OKLAHOMA CITY — The longest night of Victor Wembanyama’s NBA career was over. His postgame media responsibilities were done, and he had just seen his father and a few other people in a quiet hallway near the San Antonio Spurs locker room.
He didn’t walk back to the room. He got a ride — in a wheeled office chair, pushed by a Spurs staffer.
“Save some steps,” Wembanyama said.
Hey, after the night he had, energy was probably in short supply anyway.
A 41-point, 24-rebound playoff game. Only a few people in the history of basketball had done that — Wilt Chamberlain eight times, Hakeem Olajuwon twice, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar once, Charles Barkley once.
Add Wembanyama to that list now, after his latest masterpiece — in a career-high 49 minutes — carried the Spurs to a 122-115 double-overtime win over the Oklahoma City Thunder in Game 1 of the Western Conference finals on Monday night.
“The best player in the (expletive) world,” Spurs guard Stephon Castle announced for all the world to hear in a postgame interview on NBC.
Officially, no, that’s not the case. The best player in the NBA world right now is Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, the player who got his second consecutive Most Valuable Player award in a pregame ceremony with Wembanyama looking on. It was an award Wembanyama wanted — and still wants. Seeing Gilgeous-Alexander raise that trophy, oh, it had an effect on the 7-foot-4 French star.
“He’s competitive. If you’re a competitor and you see another competitor get rewarded with what you want. … If that’s motivation, we all get motivated by different things,” Spurs coach Mitch Johnson said. “As a competitive person, that would be my approach and perspective.”
“I’ve still got a lot to learn,” Wembanyama said. “And I want to get that trophy many times in my career.”
“The world is 8 billion people,” Wembanyama said. “That’s 8 billion opinions.”
Wembanyama’s final line: 14 for 25 from the field, 12 for 13 from the foul line, and his lone 3-pointer came late in the first overtime, tying the game from well beyond the arc. Without that shot, there’s probably no second overtime. There’s probably a 1-0 series lead for Oklahoma City going into Game 2 on Wednesday night.
He blocked three shots and changed countless others. He dunked on the Thunder and flexed, more than once. The Spurs outrebounded the Thunder 61-40. Wembanyama even smiled and posed for the cameras at times. This was his first conference finals game, on the road no less, and he was as comfortable as could be.
“I think he’s a great player with high impact obviously, and when you play against those players it’s kind of an acquired thing,” Thunder coach Mark Daigneault said. “You’re learning as you go. We’ve gone through that with other great players.”
This was a game that the Spurs were supposed to lose: underdogs, on the road, without injured point guard De’Aaron Fox, against the defending champions, a team unbeaten in the first two rounds of the playoffs. A 10-point lead in the fourth quarter was given away, and the Thunder aren’t in the habit of losing leads in the final moments.
And none of that mattered, largely because of Wembanyama. The road to the NBA title now goes through San Antonio; if the Spurs win all their home games the rest of the way, they’ll be NBA champions.
That’s a long way off. But the Spurs aren’t a rising team anymore. They’re here.
“The message would be that we as a team are ready to go into any environment, in any place, against anybody,” Wembanyama said. “And even though we’ve still got a lot to learn, our effort should be over anybody else’s. And tonight, we were relentless.”
