Victor Wembanyama may be the 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 make him a nearly impenetrable obstacle for drivers at basket. Case in point: The 7-foot-3 Wembanyama had eight blocks against the Memphis Grizzlies on Wednesday… in the first half.
So it’s fair to call any dunk on him newsworthy. When does a 6-foot-2 guard do it? This is an obvious candidate for dunk of the year… even if technically it didn’t count.
Here is the scenario. With 2:10 left in the fourth quarter of Memphis’ 129-115 win 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 really his strong suit. He continued to play. Wembanyama too, who spun in front of the basket to keep Morant away. It didn’t work.
In perhaps the coolest dunk to ever count in an NBA game, Morant launched the ball across the rim over Wembanyama’s head.
Other players have already dived on Wembanyama. Zach Edey did it earlier in this game, for example, but he’s one of the few NBA players with similar physical dimensions to the San Antonio superstar as a 7-foot-4 center . Coby White is another guard to dunk on him, but White is 6-foot-5, and Wembanyama was late in the rotation anyway, so this doesn’t really make for 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’s an important question to answer here before considering this dunk’s place in the hierarchy of season highlights: Was it even a dunk? Well, that depends on your definition of a dunk. Morant’s hands didn’t touch the rim. Rather, he threw the ball through. If you require rim contact for a dunk to be officially called a dunk, then it’s a kind of mutated layup.
In this case, however, Blake Griffin’s famous jam on Timofey Mozgov or Dwight Howard’s “Superman” dunk during the 2008 Dunk Contest would also be layups. Another definition of a dunk, perhaps based on the direction the hand that released the ball was moving, makes more sense.
In the end, though, whether it was a dunk or not didn’t matter. Just like the fact that it didn’t count in the stat sheet. We watch basketball largely 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.
