Wemby-Scoot II and a Glimpse Into the Future of the NBA

PORTLAND, Ore. — Outside of Damian Lillard’s homecoming next month, Thursday has stood out on the Trail Blazers’ schedule since the day it was released in August as the date with the most intrigue.

For the first time since last October, when nearly every NBA front office was on hand in Las Vegas for an exhibition game between Metropolitans 92 and G League Ignite, Victor Wembanyama and Scoot Henderson faced off. Their planned rematch at Summer League in July was scuttled when Henderson got hurt. And a freak accident during warmups last week meant Wembanyama will only be playing one end of this back-to-back. Sucks for anyone who has tickets to Friday night’s encore presentation, which will look a lot more like two teams with a combined 13 wins facing off.

Henderson found out he was going to start earlier in the day on Thursday, and it wasn’t because of any strategic change from Chauncey Billups. Anfernee Simons woke up feeling under the weather, and Shaedon Sharpe is still out with the adductor injury that’s sidelined him for the past three games.

Far from being entrenched in the Blazers’ starting lineup as many thought he would be before the season started, Henderson got that nod by default for the matchup with the most eyes squarely on him. Billups implied before the game that Henderson had the rematch with Wembanyama circled. He denied this was the case when I asked him about it postgame.

“Nah. Same mindset I had last time going against him,” Henderson said. “Worry about myself and our team. I can’t really focus too much on them.”

In the little time I’ve had to get to know Henderson since the Blazers drafted him in June, he’s been someone who’s gone to great lengths to seem unbothered by everything that’s come with the spotlight of his life as a No. 3 overall pick. Before his NBA debut in October, he insisted he wasn’t thinking about going against his childhood idol, Russell Westbrook. So that answer after his rematch with Wembanyama wasn’t surprising.

But Henderson was a little late coming into the locker room after the game because he wanted to get in another full workout, less than an hour after starting and playing 36 minutes in an NBA game. Part of that is the things your body is able to do when you’re 19. It was also a sign that, whatever he said to the contrary, he took this loss a little more personally.

Thursday wasn’t Henderson’s cleanest game. His 25 points were a career high, but most of them came with the game pretty much decided, and he shot 8-of-23 from the field, picked up four fouls in the first half and finished with six turnovers. As has been the case a few times this season, he was better defensively than offensively. For a stretch in the second quarter, Henderson and Ibou Badji injected the Blazers’ defense with a shot of energy that helped them claw back from—tell me if this sounds familiar—a truly awful first-quarter effort that saw them get outscored 38-14 by one of the three offenses in the NBA worse than theirs.

“I thought he struggled early,” Billups said. “But one thing about Scoot is, he’s gonna keep grinding the whole time. He struggled a little bit early with his decision-making, but I also thought his fire and his fight were the things that helped change the game for us in the second quarter. That’s kind of the gift and the curse with a young point guard right now. It took him a little bit to calm down, but when he did, he gave us everything we needed.”

If Henderson’s NBA career had started off more consistent than it has, closer to what people expected when the Blazers moved on from Lillard to reset around him, maybe this game would have come with more fanfare. It might have been flexed into a national slot on TV and drawn the attention of more out-of-town national writers wanting to parachute in.

But as he’s experienced exactly the kinds of growing pains you’d expect out of a teenager learning to play the toughest position in the NBA, Henderson has been somewhat of an afterthought in the landscape of the league. Nationally, the Rookie of the Year battle is a two-man race between Wembanyama and Chet Holmgren, and that probably isn’t changing. Locally, the Blazers have—wisely, in my opinion—dialed back the amount Henderson is featured in marketing campaigns.

Just as Billups has wanted to keep the training wheels on by bringing Henderson off the bench in his rookie season, the organization doesn’t need to build up public expectations beyond what he’s able to deliver on right now. He, and they, have his whole career to do that. Performances like the one in Tuesday’s win over Sacramento offer plenty of reason to believe he’ll get where he needs to go in his career. Performances like Thursday just show that they’re right to slow-play the hype.

Now, Wembanyama? There aren’t enough superlatives for the first in-person look at what that’s going to be.

The final stat line—30 points on 9-of-14 shooting, six rebounds, six assists and seven blocks in only 24 minutes—doesn’t fully capture it. There were at least two more blocks he could have gotten credit for, plus several other would-be shot attempts he made Blazers players think twice about. Portland started Moses Brown, who is every bit of his listed height of 7-foot-2, and seeing him on the court next to Wembanyama brought to mind that photo of Yao Ming towering over Shaq.

“He has some stuff that’s like, ‘What do you do about it?’” Jabari Walker said. “When you’re between the guard and him, you just feel helpless. You have to think three seconds ahead because of how tall he is. And then when he’s guarding you, you see that he’s going to go help block a shot, but you can’t say anything to the guards. You’ve just got to look at it. It seems like he’s there, but then he’s here. He’s in a lot of places at once.”

At one point, Billups had to call a timeout just to remind his team that they can’t treat any drive to the basket like they would against anyone else.

“We have to understand, [the shot] looks open, but it’s not,” he said. “We put our heads down and take off to the basket, but it’s not open. This kid is there every single time. You’re in the middle and you’re looking at one or two guys, and he just…appears.”

The Blazers and Spurs are both in the beginning stages of their rebuilds. Portland’s roster is much further along, much more competitive on a night-to-night basis and makes much more sense than San Antonio’s does. But they don’t have Wembanyama.

All the breathless hype that’s built up around this kid over the past two years undersells what seeing it in person is like. This is the future. The Blazers will eventually be pretty good, too. But this is the future.