By Leah Asmelash, CNN
(CNN) — Factually, Victor Wembanyama could have sent New York Knicks fans into fits of loathing. As the Knicks return to the Finals for the first time since 1999, when they were summarily dismissed by the San Antonio Spurs and the towering young superstar Tim Duncan, they find themselves facing the Spurs again and looking up — and up, and up — at an even younger, even more towering superstar: 22 years old and an extraordinarily long-limbed, game-warping 7 foot 4.
In Madison Square Garden on Monday night, Wembanyama put up a Duncan-esque 32 points, 8 rebounds, 6 assists and 3 blocks to break the Knicks’ enchanted-seeming 13-game playoff winning streak — scoring and defending from everywhere as he and his bouncy, equally young teammates frustrated the Knicks, quelled a howling crowd and scrapped their way back into the series.
Yet there’s something about Wembanyama — “Wemby” to everyone, including the refs — that makes people want to be on his side. Facing a nightmarish opponent, New Yorkers’ first response was to meet the moment with uncharacteristically cheerful jokes.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani — a Knicks diehard before he ever became a politician — posted a message inviting Wembanyama to a government hearing that would draw him away from his warmups for Game 3:
“I’m pleased to invite @Wemby to our second Commission on Government Efficiency hearing on Wednesday June 10th 5-8pm, where we’ll be asking the public for their thoughts on how government can run better. Would love to have you there for the whole time!”
Film at Lincoln Center invited Wembanyama to spend the day before that game sitting still at a marathon movie showing:
“We hereby offer Mr. Wembanyama tickets to our Sunday, June 7 screening of Bernardo Bertolucci’s stunning five-and-a-half hour epic 1900 when he is in the city later this week on a work-related trip…” the organization teased.
In fact, the day before the game, Wembanyama was spotted in Gramercy Park with a sketchbook, apparently drawing the statue of Edwin Booth playing Hamlet there. It was of a piece with his established record: supporting local artists; spending a summer with the Shaolin monks in Henan, China; playing chess at public tables.
For the city that produced the author, activist, actor and 19-time All-Star Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, a bookish ectomorph with MVP-level talent is not entirely unheard of. And once the Knicks–Spurs Finals matchup was confirmed, fans had jokes, less about his generational basketball skills and more about his highbrow habits.
“I worry that Wembanyama will get caught up in the distractions of New York City, like the Rose Reading Room at the public library or the upcoming conference on participatory futures at The New School,” one user said.
“The chess park is the most dangerous of them all,” another user added. “It’s like strip clubs to Harden.”
Colin Smith, who has run the fan account Knicks Muse since 2021 and has been a Knicks fan his whole life, can’t remember a team who has faced such little malice from Knicks fans during the playoffs.
“It’s really not hard to become a villain in New York,” Smith said. “You do a subtle celebration, you do something to one of our players, Knicks fans are not going to be afraid of it. At the same time, I think Knicks fans have this respect for Wemby.”
“Nobody loves Goliath,” the towering Wilt Chamberlain was credited with saying as he filled up the NBA record book. That principle has crumbled so far in the face of Wembanyama’s combination of incomprehensible on-court abilities, youthful enthusiasm and cosmopolitan-unto-eccentric savoir faire.
Out on the floor — blocking a layup at one end, then showing up in seemingly three long strides to nail a three-pointer at the other — he’s a baffling, otherworldly problem for opponents, as shown by the sudden impotence of the defending champion Oklahoma City Thunder in this year’s Western Conference finals.
Out in the world, though, he seems identifiable, verging on relatable. On recent trips to New York, he was photographed jumping the subway turnstile and playing chess in Washington Square Park. During the high-profile ICE raids at the start of the year, he said he was “horrified” by the news in Minneapolis and wanted to speak up rather than give a PR-approved statement, one of the few high-profile stars in the league to do so.
And after winning the conference finals, he cried while hugging his teammates and held up the series MVP trophy so a group of traveling Spurs fans could touch it. He may be an alien on the basketball court, but off it, there’s a sense that Wemby is curious and emotional in a familiar, ordinary register.
Knicks fans seemingly don’t know what to do with him. How can you hate someone who curates a reading list for his public library, brought a book to the All-Star game and apparently reads before every game? Rather than the vitriol usually reserved for star players on opposing teams, Wembanyama has been met instead with an affectionate curiosity from some fans and a reluctant respect from others.
In the commercialized and commodified NBA world, Wembanyama stands apart. He refuses to do soda ads because he “doesn’t want to kill the kids,” eschewed the stereotypical Cancun NBA star vacation for training in rural China and is straightforward and honest about his team in press conferences.
For basketball junkies, his commitment to the game, not just the NBA lifestyle, commands admiration, Smith said.
“He keeps it real,” Smith said. “He’s really focused on one thing — it’s basketball.”
This is not the treatment other stars have gotten when playing the Knicks. Trae Young won Madison Square Garden’s undying enmity in the 2021 playoffs for the Atlanta Hawks, punctuating game-breaking shots by shushing the crowd or bowing to the fans and waving goodbye. Five years later, Knicks fans still scream “F**k Trae Young!” when he comes to town — or even when the Knicks played the Hawks after Atlanta traded him away.
Reggie Miller of the Indiana Pacers likewise antagonized New York fans by wrapping his hands around his neck to signal that the Knicks had choked after he scored 25 fourth-quarter points to win Game 5 of the 1994 Eastern Conference finals. Last year, the Pacers’ Tyrese Haliburton made himself a villain by copying Miller’s gesture, likewise in the conference finals, after he hit a high-bouncing shot at the buzzer to force overtime in a game that the Knicks had seemed to be winning comfortably before the final minute.
“The Knicks are the biggest prima donnas I know. They think they’re God’s gift to basketball,” Miller said in 1995, a year after the “choke” and just after he scored a flurry of eight points in 8.9 seconds to overcome the Knicks in Game 1 of the eastern conference semifinals. Knicks fans still get upset when Miller, now an NBA commentator, shows up to call their games.
But when the filmmaker and superfan Spike Lee wrote an ode to the Knicks’ infectious joy — this was the same man who spent years taunting Miller while sitting courtside during those ’90s playoffs runs — even Lee couldn’t help but admit he actually loves Wembanyama.
“I’m also a big Wemby fan,” Lee wrote. “I have one of his game-worn rookie jerseys, signed to me, on the wall of my office/museum. I love the fact that he played chess in Washington Square Park. Wemby is a 7-foot-4 man of the people.”
In the opening moments of this year’s finals, in San Antonio, Wembanyama dribbled like he was going to the basket, stopped, and hit a step-back jumper from just beyond the free-throw line. At the watch party Smith attended, everybody looked around the room in shock. If this was Wembanyama’s introduction to the Knicks faithful, they were impressed.
“I had never seen a reaction like that to a first basket of the game,” Smith said. “His physical profile is just so impressive, and what he’s able to do is something we’ve never seen before.”
But that awe has its limits. The most charming basketball player is still a basketball player, who is trying to take a championship opportunity away from New York. In Monday’s Game 3, in addition to scoring efficiently and wrecking the Knicks’ previously fluid ball movement, Wembanyama at one point reached down, drove his forearm into the back of the neck of the Knicks’ star point guard, Jalen Brunson, and — unseen and unpenalized by the refs — shoved Brunson to the floor. Afterwards, fans chanted “F**k you, Wemby!”
In his post-game press conference, Wembanyama was asked if he was becoming a villain. “I guess,” he said. “I’m nowhere near Trae Young level, though.”
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