ADRIAN FLORIDO, HOST:
The New York Knicks are one game away from their first NBA championship title in 53 years. But the player everyone's been watching this season isn't a New York Knick. Twenty-two-year-old star Victor Wembanyama, known as Wemby, is from France. He's a seven-foot-four shot blocker who moves like a guard and may be one of the most gifted players the game has ever seen. In game five tonight in San Antonio, he'll be trying to keep his team alive, the Spurs. And as Rebecca Rosman reports, the club outside Paris that trained him as a kid will be cheering him on.
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REBECCA ROSMAN, BYLINE: This is not Madison Square Garden, and it's not the Spurs arena, either. It's a green-and-white draped gym in Nanterre, just west of Paris. But for Spurs fans, this is the court where their star Victor Wembanyama first learned his skills as a kid, training with Nanterre 92, a French basketball club founded in 1927.
FREDERIC DONNADIEU: (Speaking French).
ROSMAN: Frederic Donnadieu is the club's president. Back in 2014, he was the coach who first saw Wembanyama when he showed up with his uncle for a trial practice.
DONNADIEU: (Speaking French).
ROSMAN: He says the boy was so tall - already over six feet - that people mistook him for the assistant coach.
DONNADIEU: (Through interpreter) And during the whole practice, I was just really impressed by his abilities, his technique, in spite of his size, and especially his smile and his joie de vivre.
ROSMAN: After that first practice, Donnadieu went home and called his dad.
DONNADIEU: (Through interpreter) And I said, I just coached the best player of my life.
ROSMAN: He was talking about a 10-year-old. He says Wembanyama already had a feel for the basket, a coordination you simply don't see in a kid that size, plus a politeness and intelligence that was unusually sophisticated.
DONNADIEU: (Speaking French).
ROSMAN: "I immediately knew that he was very special," he says. Nine years later...
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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: The San Antonio Spurs select Victor Wembanyama...
(CHEERING)
DONNADIEU: To overwhelming applause, the San Antonio Spurs took Wembanyama first overall in the NBA draft. He reacted in tears.
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VICTOR WEMBANYAMA: I've dreamed of it so much. You know, I got to cry, man.
ROSMAN: And almost overnight, the lanky French teenager became Wemby. He's the latest in a long line of French players to make that jump in recent decades. Among them, Tony Parker, Nicolas Batum, Rudy Gobert. But none arrived with quite this much excitement.
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ROSMAN: Back on the court in Nanterre, a new generation is training in Wemby's footsteps. In between free throws, 16-year-old Kalil Dret says he has grand ambitions for his country, whose basketball team won silver at the Paris 2024 Summer Olympics.
KALIL DRET: (Speaking French).
ROSMAN: "France has an excellent basketball training program," he says, "maybe one that could even surpass the U.S." Shaun Powell has been watching that rise. He's a senior writer for nba.com, who has covered the league for 40 years. He's described France as a, quote, "superpower" in the NBA. And when Wembanyama came on the scene three years ago, Powell says he already sensed something rare.
SHAUN POWELL: If only because of his height, his age and also his basketball ability at that time - of course, potential only goes so far. You have to actually do it.
ROSMAN: Now that Powell has watched Wembanyama in the finals, he can say, he is doing it.
POWELL: If he stays healthy, and he continues on his reasonable upward path, this could be the greatest player who ever lived.
ROSMAN: Back in Nanterre, Frederic Donnadieu says he doesn't like comparisons.
DONNADIEU: (Speaking French).
ROSMAN: "No," he says, "Wemby isn't the next Jordan. He's not the next Lebron."
DONNADIEU: (Speaking French).
ROSMAN: "For me, he's the next Victor," he says. "And he's going to give his own new definition of what it is to be an NBA icon." Rebecca Rosman, NPR News, Nanterre.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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