Link: https://www.poundingtherock.com/spurs-analysis/88817/what-we-learned-from-the-spurs-win-over-the-mavericks

There’s no other story. No clever side door to sneak through. We can’t frame this as the top two draft picks squaring off in their NBA debuts. We’re not here to talk about the Spurs starting a season without Gregg Popovich patrolling the sidelines for the first time in decades. And if you came looking for a warm handshake and a gentle welcome into this freshly minted NBA campaign, sorry, that’s not on the menu either. The truth is, if you care about this game, this season, or this team, the answer is Victor Wembanyama. The question is largely irrelevant.

It feels different this time, doesn’t it? There was something almost violent about the way Victor stormed onto the court and made it his own. It caught me off guard. This wasn’t some feel-good story about a tall kid from France making his way downtown, walking fast. This was a predator unleashed, a player hunting down anyone on the court trying to stop him and dissuading them of that notion immediately. I almost felt like I needed to apologize and tell people, “He’s not normally like this! He’s a sweet boy!”

But this is Victor. It always has been. The Spurs’ newest star shares plenty of DNA with the old regime, but he really is built different. There’s a hunger to be great that hums just beneath everything he does. Tim Duncan was a player whose effort only revealed itself in retrospect. He spent his career dismantling the league with the calm, quiet focus of a man enjoying a decent sandwich. I’m not sure Tim ever wanted to be great, or dominate, or do anything other than be left alone. With Victor, though, we don’t have to guess.

He wants to win. Not only that, he wants to win right now and tomorrow and the next day. He wants wins and championships and greatness. He wants to do everything that’s ever been done and then keep pushing from there. He wants to climb mountains. He wants to go to the moon. He wants to dare people to put a wall in front of him and tell him he can’t leap over it.

It’s become something of a running joke this offseason that no one knows how tall he is. He’s been listed everywhere from 7’3” to 7’5”. Brian Windhorst thinks he’s closer to 7’7”. Apocryphally, he might be even taller. Who can say? What’s interesting to me is how cagey Victor tends to be about it. He downplays it. He defers. He says things like, “I’m taller than anybody else. That’s all you need to know.” It keeps being a story, I’m sure, because people like to laugh at the idea of it being a secret. Something he thinks he can hide from the public. Pay no attention to the tall man; he’s not actually even that tall if you think about it.

Maybe it’s silly, but to me it feels like something that actually speaks volumes about who he is and what he’s about. The biggest affront to Victor Wembanyama is the suggestion that his greatness might stem from something as simple as his height. How basic. How mundane. That’s not something he can abide, and as such, he’s going to go out of his way to show you every single inch of his work. He’s going to train with monks. He’s going to run beaches with KG. He’s going to get in the post lab with Olajuwon. If you think he’s going to let the game come to him, think again.

I’m at a loss for words to describe exactly what we watched Victor do last night against Dallas, but I know it rocked me to my core in a way I wasn’t expecting. I knew it would be good. I thought it might even be great. I had no idea it would unplug my router and reset the whole system. My running bit this offseason has been asking people whether the Spurs are going to be the 2 seed or if they might slip a bit and wind up at the 3. It gets a decent laugh about sixty percent of the time, I promise. But now that we’re off and running, it doesn’t feel as funny anymore, right? Victor Wembanyama and the rest of this crew are out for blood.