Victor Wembanyama may be the single most imposing rim protector in NBA history. He’s only in his second season, but his combination of elite athleticism for his size, stellar shot-blocking instincts and absurd eight-foot wingspan makes him a nearly impenetrable obstacle for drivers at the basket. Case-in-point: the 7-foot-3 Wembanyama had eight blocks against the Memphis Grizzlies on Wednesday… in the first half.
It is therefore fair to categorize any dunk on him as newsworthy. When a 6-foot-2 guard does it? It’s an obvious dunk of the year candidate… even if it technically didn’t count.
Here’s the scenario. With 2:10 remaining in the fourth quarter of Memphis’ 129-115 victory over San Antonio, Stephon Castle committed a personal foul that stopped the game. However, the ball was in Ja Morant’s hands, and stopping isn’t exactly his forte. He kept playing. So did Wembanyama, who rotated in front of the basket to keep Morant away. It didn’t work.
In perhaps the single coolest dunk that has ever not counted during an NBA game, Morant threw the ball through the rim over Wembanyama’s head.
Other players have dunked on Wembanyama before. Zach Edey did earlier in this game, for example, but he’s one of the few players in the NBA with similar physical dimensions to San Antonio’s superstar as a 7-foot-4 center himself. Coby White is another guard to dunk on him, but White is 6-foot-5, and Wembanyama was late in the rotation anyway, so it doesn’t really qualify as an official poster.
But Morant is more than a foot shorter than Wembanyama, and he didn’t need a late rotation to posterize him.
Now, there is an important question to answer here before we consider this dunk’s place on the highlight hierarchy for the season: was it even a dunk? Well, that depends on your definition of a dunk. Morant’s hands didn’t make contact with the rim. Rather, he threw the ball through it. If you demand rim contact for a dunk to officially be called a “dunk,” then this is some sort of mutated layup.
In that case, though, Blake Griffin’s famous jam over Timofey Mozgov or Dwight Howard’s “Superman” dunk in the 2008 Dunk Contest would also be layups. An alternate definition of a dunk, perhaps one based on which direction the hand that released the ball was moving in, makes more sense.
Ultimately, though, whether it was a dunk or not was irrelevant. So was the fact that it didn’t count in the stat sheet. We watch basketball in large part to see the best athletes in the world do impossible things like this. Morant delivered on Wednesday, creating perhaps the best highlight of his illustrious career.
