THE NBA COULDN’T STOP VICTOR WEMBANYAMA, BUT DEEP VEIN THROMBOSIS DID
A league with a TV ratings issue loses the future Face of Basketball, who will miss the rest of the season with a blood clot in his right shoulder while raising medical concerns about how it happened
This is a catastrophic way of welcoming Victor Wembanyama to America. Deep vein thrombosis proves he’s an actual human being, at 7-4 and 230 pounds, and confirms he no longer can swat shots by soaring above a basket from a trampoline and flexing his arm into a player’s eyeballs. I just saw him aglow on a Netflix show about the Paris Olympics.
Now he’s out for the NBA season with clots that could block blood flow in his right shoulder. Instead of preparing the San Antonio Spurs for a possible playoff berth, he will consume blood thinners and stall a career posturing him as the Face of Basketball in the coming years. Players have returned from coagulation episodes with no problem. Chris Bosh had blood clots and retired early. Serena Williams suffered from a lung clot and called it the “scariest thing I ever experienced” before resuming her tennis greatness.
How sad. How staggering. Wembanyama could have been the Defensive Player of the Year with 176 blocks and already had shot 403 three-pointers, a blurry glimpse into the sport’s future. Who knows what he would have achieved in the postseason? The French might blame President Trump. In truth, other than wearing compression stockings and avoiding dehydration with fluids, what should he have done with his body at 21?
He plays chess with strangers in New York’s Washington Square Park. He’ll have a long offseason to move pawns while avoiding long-haul flights — he flew round-trip from the U.S. to France last month, along with frequent domestic travels — that increase poor circulation. A young man should not struggle to gain his breath without energy. What do you think, commissioner Adam Silver? Too much NBA and too many journeys too soon?
“You can’t replace Vic. I can’t stand on a guy’s shoulders and block every shot that comes to the rim,” said teammate Chris Paul, the Point God who can’t help. “Aside from his basketball ability, his charisma and what he brings into the locker room, I think, is what we’ll miss most. It's tough. Tough more than anything, I think for all of us, knowing how much he means to our team, but more so knowing how much he means to the game and how much he loves to play. First and foremost, everybody understands that basketball is what we do and not who we are. Life and everything is so much more important.”
We wondered if any player ever could stop Wembanyama. He averaged 24.3 points, 11 rebounds, 3.8 blocks and 3.7 assists, a plateau reached only by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Turns out a serious diagnosis sent him away. A league suffering from low ratings must withstand the demise of the Spurs, Luka Doncic’s early problems in Los Angeles and the angry fan base of the Dallas Mavericks. Fans should become familiar with Oklahoma City and Cleveland, teams that might make the Finals. Silver should thank himself for landing $76 billion in a new TV deal. The NBA has struggled since last summer.
“We actually know that the taller you are, the more likely you are to have blood clots, so it’s interesting that this happened to one of the tallest, if not the tallest player in the NBA,” said Dr. Geoffrey Barnes, speaking to The Athletic from University of Michigan Health, who wants to know if “something (is) structurally impeding” the veins.
And so much for the Milwaukee Bucks, who lost forward Bobby Portis for 25 games after he tested positive for tramadol. Again, as seen in tennis with top-ranked Jannik Sinner, an athlete suspended for a drug violation should treat his body like a temple. For some reason — think the worst — Portis was supposed to take Toradol, an approved drug for pain medication.
He mixed up tramadol and Toradol. Doc Rivers might wonder if he should return to ESPN for the playoffs instead of helping Giannis Antetokounmpo save his career in Wisconsin. Might he pursue a trade or free agency once the Bucks lose in the playoffs? Portis won’t appeal the ruling. Yawn while his agent babbles about an assistant who supposedly screwed up.
“I am devastated for Bobby because he made an honest mistake and the ramifications of it are incredibly significant,” Mark Bartelstein said. “Bobby unintentionally took a pain medication called tramadol, thinking he was taking a pain medication called Toradol. Toradol is an approved pain medication that he has used previously and that teams and players use for pain and inflammation at times. Tramadol, however, is not an approved pain medication and was just recently added to the banned substance list this past spring. The tramadol pill he took came from an assistant of his, with a valid prescription for the painkiller, which he mistakenly told Bobby was Toradol.
“This was, again, an honest mistake that was made because of the similarity in the names of the drugs and the fact they both serve a very similar purpose. Bobby was using this anti-inflammatory pain-reducing medication to deal with an elbow injury he had this past fall and believed he was taking Toradol to alleviate some pain in preparation for that night's game.”
Every month, every sport. Banned substances never disappear.
In due time, the NBA playoffs will start. What a shame Wembanyama can’t shake us as he did last August in his hometown, where Parisians chanted his name and treated him like a divine being. “Absolute shock,” said veteran Kevin Love, who thought he had seen it all. “First of all, you pray for him. You hope for the best, personally and professionally. He means so much to the league. He’s an incredible competitor and he has a runway to be the face of the league for the next 20 years. I can’t imagine this league without him in the short term or in the far term. He’s that important.”
He is gone. Before long, the league might join him in silence.
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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. Living in Los Angeles, he gravitated by osmosis to film projects.