Victor Wembanyama produced the first 30/5/5/5 game by a teenager in the NBA in a monster night for the Spurs. The French superstar rookie finished the night with 30 points, 5 rebounds, 5 assists, and 7 blocks as San Antonio snapped a five-game skid. Furthermore, Wembanyama's star night game against fellow high-flying prospect, Scoot Henderson. “It’s always important to me to play against great players, especially players my age,” Wembanyama said after the game. “His length alone is just weird, it’s like he hovers over you. You can’t really feel him or bump him off because of his length," Henderson said of playing against Wembanyama.
The win, just San Antonio's fifth of the season, showed what a team built around Wembanyama was capable of. “We were never stopping the ball, always moving and sharing it. The defense, we were all locked in on the shifts. We had a lot of deflections, especially in the first half. It’s details, but when you get it all together, this is what it looks like," Wembanyama said.
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Jersey From Victor Wembanyama's NBA Debut Sells For Over $700K
Wembanyama is averaging 18.8 points, 10.4 rebounds, and 3.2 blocks a game in a stellar start to his NBA career. Despite the Spurs' struggles, the hype on Wembanyama remains high. The jersey from his NBA debut has sold for $762K, nearly eight times the estimated price. The auction, handled by Sotheby's, opened last week and closed yesterday with an anonymous bidder coming away with the one-of-a-kind item. Of course, the price tag is nowhere close to the record set by Michael Jordan's 1998 Finals jersey ($10.091M). However, it's an amazing price for the jersey of a player less than 20 games into his NBA career. Furthermore, it did set a new record for the sale of an NBA rookie debut jersey. The all-time record for a full rookie uniform was set in 2021 with the sale of Kobe's rookie kit.
A major contributing factor to the auction, which reportedly drew 62 bids alone, is how Wembanyama has gone from strength to strength over the course of his young career. Of course, Wembanyama is no ordinary rookie. The Frenchman has been professionally in the well-regarded French league since 2019. While many European players come to the NBA with prior professional experience, few have that experience at the same level or hype as Wembanyama. By comparison, two-time MVP Nikola Jokic, who played three years in Serbia before the NBA, was a mid-second-round pick in 2014.
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