What Victor Wembanyama is leaving behind for the NBA - ESPN

Victor Wembanyama runs toward the bleachers. His team has just won its latest French league game in the Paris suburbs, but as his teammates fist-bump one another and amble in the direction of the locker room, Wembanyama goes the other way. He literally sprints toward the stands.

When he arrives in front of the hundred or so most passionate supporters of Nanterre (who, to be clear, root for the team Wembanyama has just beaten), the gangly, 7-foot-4 teenager doesn't preen in front of them or woof about having put up 25 points, 17 rebounds and 4 blocks. He doesn't wave his arms or sneer. He doesn't do, really, any of the things that young (and not so young) athletes do when they're looking to strut a little.

Instead, Wembanyama bows his head. He tilts his body forward. He drops his shoulders.

He leans into the crowd of people and lets them wrap him in a group hug.

Over the next few weeks and months, Wembanyama's life is going to be unceasingly about what comes next: How he handles (almost surely) being drafted by the San Antonio Spurs. What his transition to the NBA is like. Where he ends up standing in relation to great French players, like Tony Parker, and just greats, like LeBron James.

It will be relentless, and there are few weights quite so heavy as that of the future laying on the back of a young person's neck. Wembanyama has no illusions: He knows what lies ahead.

But he also knows there needs to be a goodbye.

Long before the word «Wemby» was part of the global basketball zeitgeist, Wembanyama was a big kid from a small village who made good. A kid who was proud to be French, who was determined to rise up through the French sports system, who has a connection to places and people and memories in France that are —