“Everybody is talking about him being a unicorn, being so different on the basketball court, but in real life he’s just a normal kid, having fun with friends,” said Maxime Raynaud, who transferred to Nanterre in Wembanyama’s final year there.
In October 2020, Raynaud and Wembanyama were training one afternoon when two older French pros arrived — Vincent Poirier and Rudy Gobert. Gobert played for the N.B.A.’s Utah Jazz at the time and had won the league’s Defensive Player of the Year Award twice. The teenagers started trash-talking.
“As soon as we turned from messing around talking about playing to actually playing two on two, there’s something that switches in his head and he just turns into a kill mode,” Raynaud said of Wembanyama.
Video of the games went viral. Gobert, 30, who is 7-foot-1, chuckled recently at how excited people were to see Wembanyama shooting over him. Wembanyama, at 16, was already taller than Gobert.
“In this era of social media, everything gets magnified,” Gobert said. “And you know, those young kids, it’s a lot of added pressure on them. I think what strikes me the most about him is his maturity.”
After Wembanyama graduated from high school in 2021, he left Nanterre’s professional team, Nanterre 92, for ASVEL, a club based in a suburb of Lyon, France, and owned by the former N.B.A. star Tony Parker, who is French. Then, in July, Wembanyama chose to go home: Metropolitans 92 is based in Levallois-Perret, close to where his parents live.
Fans in the city have sold out the 2,800-seat arena for the first three games of the team’s season.
