Spurs’ Victor Wembanyama draws ‘awesome’ Gregg Popovich prediction after epic rookie year

With raw ability and size obvious to the eye, Wembanyama hasn’t relied on his natural gifts.

“He’s a lot more disciplined than he was in trying to channel his talents in a direction that would make him more consistent and make the team more consistent as far as understanding how to play: time, score, when to be aggressive, when to shoot early shots, when not to shot early shots, posting up more than he ever has in his life,” Popovich said.

About a quarter into the season, the first pick in last summer’s draft moved from power forward to center. Though the game is more position-less nowadays, it represented a change. One that the 7-foot-4 marvel made.

“He’s always pretty much played on the perimeter and we got him down to play a little bit more of an inside game as well as his outside game and he warmed up to it,” the longest tenured coach in the NBA continued.

“We do it with development on the floor. We coaches talk about little things: footwork, balance, body position, court position, all those sorts of things. He works with those things on the court.

Wemby’s tools for improvement

The on-the-court work that Spurs coaches put in with Wembanyama during the season proved just a portion of his growth.

“He also sees things in film. He sees a good post up, a bad post up, a good shot, a bad shot, so on and so forth so he learns, both by being on the court, by watching film and watching film of other people doing things,” Popovich said.

As the season progressed, so did Wemby. The Spurs leading scorer averaged 20.4 points per game in November. Just two months later he averaged 24 points per contest in January. By the time the last month of the season rolled around, Wembanyama averaged 25 points in a handful of April games.

“He improved significantly in handling the physicality, gauging the speed, length and athleticism of his opponents and understanding that he was in a different league and some adjustments would have to be made on his part  in those areas. And he did,” Popovich added.

“Through time and experience, as a good learner, he improves in all those areas. Some people you can do that with and they never learn. He just soaks it up.”

It’s a trait that could be described as awesome. Gregg Popovich isn’t shying away from using the word to describe his best player.