The two potential top picks of the 2023 NBA draft put on a show in their first matchup against each other.
HENDERSON, Nev. — We can do only so much to manufacture our own history: identify the actors who might shape things to come, place them in the arena, hope for the best results, subject them to the ensuing chaos. Perhaps no unseen force can wrench a plan faster than the nerves of teenagers. And so the chances of two basketball prodigies each putting on a transcendent display Tuesday night were probably not as favorable as the oddsmakers in this desert would have surely loved you to believe.
Much of the NBA’s scouting cognoscenti descended on Las Vegas this week to find out anyway, as it’s not every day implausible 18-year-old Frenchman Victor Wembanyama flies around the world to show you what you’re missing. With a worthy foil in U.S. point guard wunderkind Scoot Henderson, the two players widely designated as the two top draft picks in next year’s cohort (in that order) faced off for the first time. Teams are going to have to lose a lot, whether engineered or incidental, to truly fathom drafting either one, but damn if that concept doesn't carry a little extra credence the morning after.
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What unfolded Tuesday felt like a glimpse of a better future. Wembanyama—who is listed at 7'2" and may be taller—scored 37 points on 20 shots, made seven threes, blocked five attempts and managed a furious second half in response to a 19-point halftime deficit. Henderson took the court with a glint in his eye and set the tone for his G League Ignite team. Wembanyama and his Metropolitans 92 fought within one possession of a win, but Henderson was unrelenting, finishing with 28 points of his own, nine assists and just two turnovers, hitting tough jumpers and attacking the paint with fervor to close a 122–115 win.
Suffice it to say, these types of spectacles almost never go according to plan, particularly in preseason exhibition games, especially when jet lag is a factor, and also when the surroundings aren’t exactly fuel. Wembanyama and Henderson had never even met before this week, and any narrative tension was mostly manufactured. Henderson hopes to challenge for the No. 1 pick but has mostly avoided commenting on it. Wembanyama was complimentary of Henderson, calling him his favorite player in their class Monday (while acknowledging his own place as the front-runner in that conversation). Even so, the Dollar Loan Center, Ignite’s new home arena just south of the Vegas strip, seemed about half full on a nondescript Tuesday evening. If anyone had bothered to fire T-shirts out of cannons, they’d have landed in the hands of eager scouts. And yet, what we got was something unusual, two young players pushing one another to their limits at a nascent stage of their careers, drawing the best out of each other more than truly besting each other.
“The hoopers hooped,” one executive in attendance stated, rather eloquently. “It was everything we could have asked for.”
Wembanyama and Henderson play opposite positions and impact the game in different ways, which meant they weren’t going to guard one another much, leaving room for both to dominate. Each made his presence duly felt, Henderson finishing around Wembanyama at the rim a few times and hitting a first-quarter three over his outstretched fingertips, but also failing while challenging his counterpart (he was the victim of three Wembanyama blocks). There were more than enough juicy head-to-head moments in the flow of things. Both players seemed to relish that. Wembanyama started slow but recaptured the spotlight with a breathtaking third-quarter shooting display that proved his mettle and that he can already take over a game with the threat of his shot, among other things. “At this age players can sink after a tough first half,” said Metropolitans coach Vincent Collet, “and he did the contrary.”
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Behind the scenes, there was reasonable debate to start the week as to how much is really at stake here in the context of the draft. That’s to say that even Henderson’s best efforts this season as a teenager in the G League may not shift the hierarchy come June, even if a point-guard-needy team wins the lottery. There was a brief moment at halftime, with Henderson wielding the momentum of his performance and Wembanyama having struggled, where the window for debate opened ever-so-slightly. But Wembanyama innately obliterates convention in a way Henderson does not, which is not a slight. His diverse talents have tugged at the heartstrings of attentive front offices for the past few years, and, barring catastrophic injury, it will be a surprise if he doesn’t hear his name called first. It’s not often that the conversation surrounding a top pick seems quite so inevitable so early. When that does happen, it’s significant and typically warranted.
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You do not find athletes as tall as Wembanyama (insert a full stop here if you feel like it) who also possess remarkable basketball aptitude, movement skills, innate focus and desire to learn. His presence on defense has been a constant—he deters and denies almost everything—and now his jump shooting—off the dribble, off movement, from the corners and with confidence—has begun to blossom. He hasn’t touched what he might be able to do as an offensive fulcrum. Wembanyama is regarded by most, if not all in the know as a generational prospect, which seems like an obtuse, cliché way to describe somebody until you hear it uttered so casually by those who have devoted their lives to the craft of identifying basketball talent that you start to believe it yourself. The salient question may be not which a team will ultimately prefer, but whether there might be two such players in this draft.
“Scoot showed he’s far from an afterthought,” another scout in attendance offered. Henderson put the fruits of diligent offseason work on display and left a strong impression with his attitude, bolder and more vocal than the version of himself who learned the ropes of the pro game in the G League last year at age 17. Henderson changed his body while maintaining his playing weight at 195 pounds, looking noticeably leaner and perhaps even faster and more explosive than last we saw him.
Henderson also looked much more confident in his jumper, and, while Ignite’s lead dried up in the second, he did an excellent job sharing the ball, displaying a promising grasp of how to manage a game and pick his spots. “Growth in [Scoot] is telling everybody where to go,” said Ignite coach Jason Hart. “The goal is to get the ball [in the NBA] as a rookie, you’ve gotta be a leader. Last year he was a little shy, youngest on the team. He’s a veteran now.” Point guards don’t develop overnight, but Henderson is well on his way to being a special one, one who can couple the physical and mental in a way that matters.
Their teams will meet a second time Thursday afternoon, before Wembanyama heads back to France to continue his season and Henderson returns to preparing for his. It’s hard to expect a contest quite so thrilling, but these are two players with the capacity to constantly buck and shift our expectations. These types of performances are abnormal only until, by definition, they’re not. There’s no guarantee either player will measure up to where imaginations are surely running, but a world where both come close to reaching their potential feels real. Because for a night, they touched it, and they touched it together, and in the moment, that was all that really mattered.
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