The Alien has a dark side

There is a version of Victor Wembanyama that the basketball world fell in love with. The 7’4″ French prodigy gliding across the court like something out of a sci-fi novel. The kid who takes the NBA Cup seriously. The competitor who cries real tears when he wins the Western Conference Finals. That version of Wembanyama is real, and it is genuinely compelling to watch. But there is another version too, one that this NBA Finals peeled back for everyone to see, and it is worth talking about honestly.

Because the Wembanyama who just lost to the New York Knicks in five games is not just someone who fell short of a championship. He is someone who shoved Jalen Brunson in the back of the neck in Game 3 and got away with it. Referees missed the moment entirely, and while the league reviewed the play afterward, no flagrant foul was ever issued, despite the NBA’s own officiating VP acknowledging that a foul had been missed.

And then there is the Game 5 landing zone play, which might be the ugliest moment of all precisely because of how calculated it appears. Brunson pulled up at the top of the arc to launch a three-pointer with Wembanyama contesting. As Brunson came down, Wembanyama stuck out his right foot directly into the Knicks guard’s landing space – and he was caught looking down while doing it, which makes it look far more than semi-intentional. This is the key detail that separates this from a positioning accident. His eyes were not up on the ball. They were down, watching where Brunson was going to land, making sure the foot was in the right place.

The NBA’s own Video Rulebook defines a landing area flagrant foul as a defender “not allowing an airborne shooter to return to the floor safely.” The play appeared to meet that criteria exactly. Brunson made the shot, came down on Wembanyama’s foot, and was left in agony on the floor, taking considerable time to get back to his feet. No whistle. Had a flagrant been called, it would have been Wembanyama’s fourth flagrant foul point of the postseason, triggering an automatic suspension. The Spurs, while Brunson was still down on the court writhing, went and hit a three on the other end. Brunson got up, walked over to official Tyler Ford, and screamed in his face. Who could blame him.

And it was not just Brunson. In Game 4, Wembanyama nearly took out OG Anunoby’s right knee at the end of the first quarter, in a play that left the basketball world divided over whether it was an accident or something more intentional.

That same game, he elbowed Karl-Anthony Towns in the face and was finally hit with a flagrant foul 1 – his second of the series.

In Game 2, he pushed Mitchell Robinson in the paint, only for Robinson to be the one who got whistled for the technical foul when he pushed back – a call the NBA later rescinded. It kept happening, game after game, and the league kept looking the other way.

Then there is the Mitchell Robinson situation in Game 4, which deserves its own paragraph because it tells you something specific about how Wembanyama operates. He scored on Robinson in the post and immediately started trash-talking him, telling him “I’m in your head” while pointing to his ear. Robinson, understandably heated, came back down the floor and elbowed Wembanyama in the face, drawing a Flagrant 1. Wembanyama hit both free throws, sat there clapping on the hardwood, and screamed “I’m in your head, boy!” Robinson got the call. Wembanyama got the points and the last word. But what nobody seemed in a hurry to talk about was that Wembanyama had very deliberately gotten under Robinson’s skin right before it happened. He baited him. He knew exactly what he was doing.

This is a pattern, by the way, not a Finals one-off. In the second round against Minnesota, Wembanyama was ejected for elbowing Naz Reid in the throat – a play upgraded to a Flagrant 2, the highest designation the league issues.

And when the Spurs lost Game 5 of the Western Conference Finals to Oklahoma City, cameras caught Wembanyama whispering in the ears of bench players Mason Plumlee and Bismack Biyombo before they entered the game. Both went on to deliver hard fouls to Jared McCain – with Plumlee hitting McCain in the back during a screen and sending him to the floor. Whether Wembanyama instructed that or not is something only he knows. But the cameras saw what they saw.

All of this sits in strange contrast to the image of the guy who, the previous year, threw Brunson’s 61-point game ball into the stands rather than let the Knicks guard have it as a keepsake. After stealing the ball in the final seconds to seal a 130-126 overtime victory in San Antonio, Wembanyama launched it into the crowd at Frost Bank Center. The NBA fined him $25,000 for it. A ball boy sprinted into the stands to try to retrieve it from the fan who caught it, because it was immediately obvious what it was worth. Wembanyama said afterward he was just celebrating and meant no disrespect – and maybe that is true. But you scored 40 points in that game. Brunson scored 61. Whose ball is it, really?

And then there is the handshake thing. Or rather, the no-handshake thing, because that is now becoming a habit.

After the Knicks won the championship in San Antonio, Wembanyama headed straight to the locker room after missing a last-ditch three-point attempt, and several Spurs players followed. Brunson appeared to approach him for a postgame gesture. Wembanyama kept walking. Only Luke Kornet and members of the coaching staff stayed on the floor to congratulate New York. Draymond Green, watching from elsewhere, put it simply: “Wow, they didn’t shake their hands. That’s not good.” Coming from Draymond Green – a man who was himself suspended from a Finals game in 2016 for accumulating flagrant foul points – that is saying something.

But here is what makes it worse: Wembanyama had already done the exact same thing after the Spurs eliminated Oklahoma City in the Western Conference Finals. This was not a one-time grief reaction from a young kid in an impossible moment. This is the second straight time he walked off without acknowledging the team that beat him. And fans who have been paying attention know that the pattern goes back even further – one observer connected the dots all the way back to the NBA Cup Finals loss to the Knicks, noting that he “wouldn’t shake hands after they lost the cup finals” either.

There is a version of this where you give the guy some grace. He is 22 years old. He just lost the biggest game of his life in front of his home crowd. He said at the podium afterward: “It’s painful. But I’m not running away from that. I’m using it to fuel me.” Those are the right words, even if the walk-off was the wrong move. And then, wrapping up his press conference, he looked at the reporters and said: “Appreciate y’all. See y’all… never.” Which, depending on how charitable you are feeling, is either darkly funny or the most petulant exit line in recent Finals memory.

The ’91 Detroit Pistons walked off on Michael Jordan‘s Bulls and people are still talking about it 35 years later. Nobody is putting Wembanyama in that conversation exactly – but the lesson from that story has always been the same. How you lose tells people something about you. It gets remembered. ESPN’s Alan Hahn put it directly: “What’s also soft is him walking off the court and not shaking hands with the guy that just took a ring from him, that taught him how to win. One day, when Wemby wins a championship, he should remember and acknowledge what Jalen Brunson taught him in this series.”

Here is the thing about Victor Wembanyama. The talent is not in question. The basketball is genuinely extraordinary – a 22-year-old who can guard five positions, who dropped 41 points and 24 rebounds in a double-overtime Game 1 in Oklahoma City during the conference finals, who is already a Defensive Player of the Year. The future is still very bright, and the Spurs will be back. But this postseason pulled back the curtain on a character that does not quite match the mythology. The cheap shots that keep sliding past referees. The habit of vanishing before the handshake line. The ball in the stands. The “see y’all never.”

The alien turned out to have a dark side after all.