It’s one thing to open your season with a 40-point, 15-rebound masterwork, but it is quite another to discover in short order that such deeds are in fact “the least you can do.” This is the situation in which Victor Wembanyama now finds himself three days into his third season as the NBA’s most visually implausible superstar. He has already demonstrated that there isn’t any basketball-related thing he can’t do, but now he must prove that he can ease the league through the hellscape to come. Nobody else can do it. Not LeBron James, not Stephen Curry, not Shai-Gilgeous Alexander, not Nikola Jokic, and not even John Tesh. Bad times require a bad man. And these are not good times.
You read and heard all about the Bad Times part yesterday. Hall of Famer and Portland Trail Blazers coach (for the moment) Chauncey Billups and Miami Heat wing (again, for the moment) Terry Rozier were arrested on Thursday as part of two parallel and long-running gambling probes being investigated by the FBI. All of it is part of the sports industry’s consensual immolation on behalf of a new sports gambling industry that it does not fully understand and absolutely cannot control. That’s because legalization opened the door not for more casual betting at your local but the invasive kudzu of prop bets for anyone with a smartphone, including players whose deeds or lack of same are the meat of those bets.
