THE BEST SPORTS EVENT OF 2026: AN “ADDICTED” WEMBANYAMA WANTS THE KNICKS
Wemby is addicted to winning, and we are addicted to watching him, as he tries to win his first NBA championship at age 22 against a team that has won 11 straight and wants to end a 53-season drought
He is addicted to winning, which is better than a reliance on fentanyl or gambling. It’s another gleeful reason why the episode we’re about to consume — Victor Wembanyama, who is advertised by Nike as an alien, and the Knickerbockers, who haven’t won for New York in 53 years — represents a historic gathering. Some events are worthy of yawns, regardless of how they’re hyped by leagues and goobered by TV networks.
Consider this the best sporting affair on the yearly calendar. That would include Rory McIlroy winning another Masters and Indiana winning a football championship. If Wemby wins an NBA championship at 22, with a Spurs team that would be .500 without him, his conquest would override a marathon by Michael Jordan to fit rings. If the Knicks win the Finals, Jalen Brunson will be lifted higher than One World Trade Center when he isn’t invited to an orgy by Stephen A. Smith.
This is a massive showdown, which would have been better if Wembanyama purposely threw a ball into the Madison Square Garden stands after Brunson scored 61 points two years ago. He claims he was celebrating an overtime victory after contributing 40 points and 20 rebounds, but folks in the big city want him to pay anyway. An attendant had to retrieve the ball and give it to Brunson, who said then of Wemby, “He’s going to be one of the greatest players this game has seen.”
He was right. And Brunson, at 6-2, is the latest small man to take on the 7-5 force from France, who makes the same glittering comment about his rival. “I mean, this is the best basketball on the planet that’s being played right now,” Wembanyama said. “And the crazy thing is ... I want to do that 15, 20 more times. Let’s hope it doesn’t become an addiction. Maybe it is already.”
His dependency is reaching epic levels on social media and television. Nike is selling a signature shoe, obviously, and shows him surrounded by nuns until the ad ends with him forcibly shoving his hand into Shai Gilgeous-Alexander’s face. He is a friendly guy, except when he fired an ejection elbow against Minnesota or when he blew off the media last week. The idea in New York is to anger him — which won’t happen during the first two games in San Antonio, a small city smelling another dynasty — and might have to involve fans who aren’t sure whether to keep seats or sell them for multiple thousands.
The series won’t start until Wemby enters the Garden. The celebrities will pounce. He will hear “1973” so often that he’ll wave for the ball and toss it toward the basket from 35 feet. The Spurs should win the series, and if they do, Wembanyama becomes not only the face of the league but the face of sport on Earth. Imagine Paris, his hometown, as the king of basketball and European soccer. He is four wins from his feat.
“I want to win so bad, it’s like my life depends on it,” he said, adding, “When you lay a brick every time you get a chance, and you lay it perfectly fine, at the end of the day you get a big castle.”
His castle is your castle. “Falling in love with basketball happened really early on in my life,” Wembanyama continued. “I mean, I have pictures of myself with a basketball at an age where I was not even old enough to have memories.”
At one month? One day?
The trick is to determine if marketers will turn Wemby into a happening bigger than the sport. We’ve seen awesome players from Europe — Giannis Antetokounmpo, Nikola Jokic, Luka Doncic — but none were accompanied by a magnificent commercial blitz. Companies know he’s 7-5 and has mastered traits known to all sizes. A victory means he’ll be viewed, in due time, as possibly the greatest two-way performer ever. He’s already the unanimous Defensive Player of the Year and is comparable to Shohei Ohtani, who pitches and swings as Wembanyama rejects an extraordinary number of shots and scores from all distances. People get on me for raving too much about him.
But this is a revolution. He already has redesigned the game and, by winning the Finals, he’d make the challenge all but impossible for opponents. As it is, franchises are stuck in a slackjaw mode as they watch him dominate. They’ve seen Jordan, LeBron James, Kobe Bryant, Shaquille O’Neal, Wilt Chamberlain and Bill Russell, but there’s only one Wemby. Only Magic Johnson, at 6-9, won a championship at a younger age among all-timers. But try defending Wemby with Magic.
“Watching him as a player, it’s pretty unbelievable,” Brunson said. “The things he’s able to do on both sides of the ball, people have never really seen before from a person of his size. So, it’s incredible to watch. He’s pretty incredible.”
“The best player in the world,” Spurs teammate Stephon Castle said.
Understand how the Knicks, who have won 11 straight games, might be walking into the netherworld in south Texas. Mike Brown must remind folks about his team: “Our guys are playing pretty good basketball.” Best of luck, anyway, to Karl-Anthony Towns, who might lose his apostrophe if he stays too long on Wemby. On the eve of the Finals, Towns dared to say: “The greatest currency you can earn in New York City is not money, but it’s respect. To have the respect of the fans in the city, we are rich beyond belief.” The fans will make him poor if he’s part of a defensive structure — along with Mitchell Robinson, who has a broken pinky finger, and OG Anunoby — that allows 40.
At one point, when discussing Hall of Fame coach Gregg Popovich, Wembanyama chose to point out the series hasn’t started. Did El Jefe, as he’s called, tell him say that when the plane landed at the airport? “I saw Pop right away when we landed. The emotion was something I haven’t felt in a while, I don’t even know since when,” he said. “Coming back down from this is a challenge. We still need to really come back down to Earth and realize we haven’t done the hardest (task) yet. The job isn’t done at all.”
In Paris, the Finals games start at 2:30 a.m. No bar is open, not even a place on Rue de Crimee, which hosted a watch party for an earlier game last month. If France wanted to display Wembanyama properly, it would place an enormous TV on the Eiffel Tower. Or the Louvre, except someone might steal it.
Thievery involving the Knicks? It might be their only chance.
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Jay Mariotti, called “without question the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes general sports columns for Substack while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts and shows in production today. He is an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and talk/podcast host.