Wembanyama prepares to become ‘genuine’ face of the NBA

One day last summer, Harrison Barnes, an NBA veteran, was finishing up an offseason workout with Victor Wembanyama, his 7-foot-4, then-20-year-old San Antonio Spurs teammate and one of the league’s most dazzling young stars. He was beginning to understand that Wembanyama was precocious in more than one way.

In the NBA, many teams track shooting percentages and shots made in games and at practice as a way of gauging their players’ progress. The Spurs had a chart that tracked both, but ranked players based on makes. Barnes told Wembanyama that metric felt insufficient. Wembanyama pondered Barnes’ concern. Then he picked up a marker and sketched out some thoughts on a whiteboard.

“He was really trying to wrap his mind around, like, ‘How do you get better at that?’” Barnes said. “How do you chart what progress is?”

That day, Barnes saw into Wembanyama’s psyche — the sincere search for knowledge and human connection that he has carried with him through the early part of his NBA career. It leads to the kind of authenticity that marketers crave and fans are drawn to.

Wembanyama came into the NBA from France as the most hyped prospect since LeBron James. He was taken first overall in the 2023 draft, and his play on the court has matched the early expectations. He can handle the ball like someone a foot shorter. He can dunk and shoot 3-pointers, generating debates about which he should do more. He is perhaps the most fearsome defender in the league, with an 8-foot wingspan that is nearly impassable.

As the NBA confronts its future without an aging James and his contemporaries Stephen Curry and Kevin Durant, Wembanyama has embraced the idea that he will lead it, with his play and his endeavors off the court. And he has learned that the best way to present himself is to just be who he is, a person intensely focused on being a great basketball player, who also loves reading fantasy novels, playing chess and gathering all the knowledge he can about the world.

“Most of us want to craft a nice legacy and nice image because those are the things that people will remember,” Wembanyama, who turned 21 this month, said in a recent interview. “But on the other side, I think the best way for me to have the best image, and to give the right messages I want to send, is to be genuine. Just, like, not force myself to do things that don’t resemble me or to say things that I don’t believe in.

“I’m not in a hurry, but I make strategic choices,” Wembanyama said. “And I don’t hesitate turning down offers in the millions and millions of dollars just for something that I don’t believe in.”

Wembanyama was the league’s rookie of the year last season and its leader in blocked shots per game. This season, he became the first player in NBA history to have more than 2,000 points, 1,000 rebounds and 200 3-pointers in his first 100 games. He is the betting favorite to be the league’s defensive player of the year, an honor rarely given this early in a player’s career.

Wembanyama scored 50 points against the Washington Wizards in November, his first 50-point game and only the eighth 50-point game in Spurs history. After the game, he downplayed what he had done, saying he hoped it was just one of many accomplishments he would have in his career.

Wembanyama knows he will eventually be judged by how many championships he wins, which seems just fine with him.

“He has larger ambitions,” Barnes said. “He is motivated by winning. He wants to be one of those guys who goes and wins an Olympic gold medal, he goes and wins an NBA championship, that those are the things that really motivate him.”

Wembanyama has increased the Spurs’ popularity in France dramatically, and his jersey is the second-bestselling NBA uniform in Europe, behind James’. He is the league’s third-most viewed player on social media globally, trailing only James and Curry. After his Milwaukee Bucks played the Spurs this month, Greece’s Giannis Antetokounmpo said Wembanyama would “be a face of the league for a lot of years.”

Larger motivations

In 2022, an upstart sports drink company called Barcode started hatching a plan to land Wembanyama as a partner.

Barcode was founded in 2020 by Bar Malik, who had worked with NBA teams and players, and Kyle Kuzma, a forward for the Washington Wizards who then played for the Los Angeles Lakers. One of Barcode’s top investors was a businessperson named Karim Maachi, who had a close relationship with Wembanyama’s agents.

Wembanyama said he relied on his agents, Bouna Ndiaye and Jeremy Medjana, the founders of the agency Comsport, and his marketing agent, Issa Mboh, Comsport’s head of global marketing, to filter offers.

“My goals in business with who I partner with is, it’s not money,” Wembanyama said. “The motivation is more to create an ecosystem of things that I can relate to and to create a legacy of things I want to leave behind me.”

He trusts that they know him well enough to choose the right opportunities. Before he entered the NBA, they spent months interviewing dozens of Wembanyama’s friends and family members to make sure they had a clear picture of who he was as a person.

“We want him to stay French,” Ndiaye said. “Because some of the international players, they go into the U.S., and they get Americanized. And we also want him to embrace the American culture because he lives in the U.S. He’ll live there for maybe all his life.”

Wembanyama currently has deals with Nike and the French luxury fashion brand Louis Vuitton, both of which help him solve the problem of how someone so tall and thin can find clothes. He also works with the San Antonio-based grocery chain H-E-B, the sports merchandise company Fanatics and the video game NBA2K, all brands with long histories of relationships with stars.

Barcode was not that type of company. It is now the official sports drink of the Spurs, the Brooklyn Nets and the Miami Heat, but back then, it was an unproven startup. Maachi knew that could be a disadvantage when he first broached the idea of pursuing Wembanyama with Malik.

“We have about a 1% chance of getting him,” Maachi told Malik.

But why not try?

They made it past the agents’ screening. Then Malik made a presentation to Wembanyama over a video call in November 2022.

“It really spoke to me,” Wembanyama said.

A few months later, Malik and Wembanyama met at a coffee shop in Paris. He asked for equity in the company and now has the second largest stake next to Malik. He is also the face of the brand. The successful effort to sign Wembanyama made Maachi think of “Air,” the movie about how Nike signed Michael Jordan.

In the conference room in Milwaukee, Wembanyama was told about Maachi’s comparison.

“That’s funny,” Wembanyama said. “I sure hope I can have the same kind of impact. Of course.”

The partnership between Nike and Jordan was transformative for both, as Jordan became the best to ever play the game.

Is that Wembanyama’s goal? He hesitated.

“So,” he said, then hesitated for several seconds more.

“I’m a superstitious person,” he said. “I don’t talk about my — I don’t say my goals out loud.”

Wembanyama smiled sheepishly and noted it was a good way to answer this question, one he is sure to get again.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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