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Jun 27, 2023

Victor Wembanyama preparing for NBA stardom with France basketball coach Vincent Collet

Ahead of Tuesday’s NBA draft lottery, veteran coach Vincent Collet has spent the

Ahead of Tuesday's NBA draft lottery, veteran coach Vincent Collet has spent the past season honing the most prized prospect since LeBron James.

Victor Wembanyama has known for a year that he will be the No. 1 pick in this year's NBA draft. As the most highly rated prospect since LeBron James, the 7-foot-3 teenager from France is all but guaranteed a fast-track to the league. All he needed to decide was how to use his final year before leaping across the Atlantic.

Wembanyama knew he could have spent it eating croissants and still been the prize that will be on offer in Tuesday night's NBA draft lottery, when he’ll find out which team he will play for in the U.S. next year. He also could have remained with his pro club in Lyon, where he had just won a French championship. Instead, he moved last summer to the Boulogne-Levallois Metropolitans, a pro club with a small gym on the outskirts of Paris.

That's where he would find the man who would prepare him for NBA greatness: a 59-year-old former guard named Vincent Collet, who's never played outside of France. He's been coaching French pro basketball since before Wembanyama was born, yet never seen a player quite like him. Wembanyama moves like a guard and defends like a wall. Unsurprisingly, he also leads the league in scoring and rebounds.

"He understands that there's more out there for him to do and that's the only way he can live up to his destiny," Collet says. "He's seeing basketball more and more differently — in a good way."

Though he's never worked in the NBA, Collet is ideally positioned to prepare the future No. 1 pick to face the likes of Kevin Durant and Luka Doncic, because he's the only coach in the country who has ever faced them. Since 2009, Collet has also been head coach of the French national basketball team that took down the U.S. at the 2019 FIBA World Cup and won Olympic silver in Tokyo two years later.

Now, the timing couldn't be better for the coach and his extraterrestrial player to deepen their relationship. France will head to this summer's World Cup among the favourites and then have home-court advantage at the Paris Olympics next summer. As a son of the Paris suburbs, Wembanyama is certain to be one of the faces of the Games.

And by then, Collet's work this season should be starting to pay off. He has spent all year focused on how to make Wembanyama a more well-rounded player.

"In a lot of situations, he compensated with his sheer size," Collet says. "But now he moves better and he's still got room for progress … Even if he's extremely good, he was only 18."

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Age-wise, Wembanyama is essentially the equivalent of a college basketball player making the leap after his freshman year. The difference is that he's already had four years of seasoning in professional basketball against full-grown men. In that time, Wembanyama has won a French title, been a two-time league All-Star, and was the MVP of last year's All-Star game.

Yet when Collet first got him on the practice court, Wembanyama was just a bit too much of a ball-hog for his taste. He couldn't blame him for it — Wembanyama was such a lock for stardom that NBA TV was already sending crews to France to broadcast his progress in the States. But Collet felt he could gently nudge him toward a better understanding of his teammates.

"It was about showing him that he could have just as much influence on the game by letting go of the ball," Collet says. "Remember how many of Michael Jordan's title-winning moments came with an assist when everyone was expecting him to shoot," he tells him.

Collet didn't have this issue with the last true French star he worked with. Then again, by the time he began coaching Tony Parker on the national team in 2009, Parker was already established in the NBA with the San Antonio Spurs. Collet even borrowed schemes from the Spurs’ playbook to help Parker feel more comfortable.

With Wembanyama, the task is less about harnessing an already effective veteran and more about dispensing the right advice to reshape his game. Collet has worked on how he reads the court. He's encouraged him to try riskier passes, quicker and more often. Wembanyama says he's felt the difference.

"Individually, I see the consistency of my game as a sign that it's actually getting better," Wembanyama said here last week. "Defences are getting tighter all the time. From game to game, they’re trying harder to adapt to me."

The part of Wembanyama's development that Collet couldn't have planned on was the sudden loss of the team's starting point guard — not to injury, but to a locker room fight. Tremont Waters, a former star at Louisiana State University and second-round NBA draft pick, was fired from the team after brawling with teammate Steeve Ho You Fat during a defeat to AS Monaco in early April. When Waters left the club, Wembanyama's role as a passer expanded by necessity.

"We can't create as much off the dribble, so we had to find another solution," Collet said.

On Tuesday night, Wembanyama will find out which part of the planet he's visiting next. At around 2am. Paris time, one of 14 NBA teams will be drawn-out of a pot and earn the right to select him with the No. 1 pick. The three most likely destinations, each with a 14% chance, are the Detroit Pistons, the Houston Rockets and the San Antonio Spurs.

In the meantime, Wembanyama is still savouring his final games before NBA superstardom. Earlier this month, the Mets moved a home game from their cramped gym in Levallois to the 15,000-seat Bercy arena in Paris, explicitly so more fans could watch him while he was still in France. It was the equivalent of shifting a game from Columbia to Madison Square Garden.

Wembanyama didn't disappoint. He had 25 points and 10 rebounds against Bourg-en-Bresse, including a dunk in the first minute that had the crowd chanting his name immediately. It took "Wemby," as they called him, nearly 10 minutes just to leave the court after the game as he stopped for selfies and autographs on a farewell lap.

"People are proud to have seen him play," Collet said. "What's happening around Victor … it's magnifique."

-The Wall Street Journal

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