Victor Wembanyama’s hands were lost on opening night

The official score only credits Victor Wembanyama with four turnovers in San Antonio’s 109-120 loss Thursday night to the host Dallas Mavericks. I guess it’s not a turnover when a rebound slips out of your hands, or else I’m sure that number would have zeros afterwards. Wembanyama is one of the most talented and extraordinary athletes alive; can do almost everything; and against the Mavs his hands seemed to belong to someone completely different. Possibly Pazuzu.

You can’t revolutionize sport each evening. Up to 81 times this regular season, Wembanyama will warp the game in astonishing and impressive ways; He will do things that no one his size has done before and that put the agility and coordination of world-class athletes a foot shorter to shame. On Thursday night, it was as if he had accidentally left one of his spatial dimensions (depth, surely) in the locker room. The Mavericks would miss a shot, the rebound would be there and Wembanyama would be there to catch it, and the ball would go past (what should have been) his grip as if it were a green screen artifact. A Spurs teammate would throw a balloon in his direction, and he would jump and stretch out those incredible arms… and interact with the ball like a light breeze, barely altering its trajectory.

All of this, of course, is a bit of a stretch: Wembanyama shot an atrocious 5-for-18, but still scored 17 points and only had four turnovers. (If he was 5-foot-11, 26 years old, despised by everyone who ever played with him, and averaged those numbers for an entire season, the Washington Wizards would give him a max contract.) He materialized enough times to get nine rebounds. But there really were moments, particularly in the first half, when his overt struggle to simply hold onto the ball became absurd. It kept happening! His hands touched (or, well, were visibly adjacent to) the ball what seemed like half a dozen times for every time he successfully caught it. I felt really bad for him, and also because I needed a lesson from the boy from Ghost who taught Patrick Swayze how to play things.

This was the first game of the season for both teams and the rust was evident. For Dallas, Luka Doncic and Kyrie Irving combined to miss 27 shots in 42 attempts; The immortal Chris Paul, perhaps Wembanyama’s most important new teammate, scored three points on 1-of-6 shooting. None of this means anything in particular, unless it persists, in which case it means that someone must search for Victor Wembanyama’s body so that his astral form can return to him.