SAN ANTONIO - Victor Wembanyama’s 52-point, 24-rebound night against Dallas had plenty of eye-catching moments, but the one he keeps coming back to is the one that sent him to the floor.
“ I don’t have any agenda when I say it,” he said, “but it’s when I rolled my ankle.”
With 9:11 left in the fourth quarter on Wednesday, Wembanyama’s right foot landed on Walter Clayton Jr.’s left shoe as he turned to sprint back on defense. His ankle folded inward, he hit the floor and grabbed at his leg.
It looked ugly. It didn’t keep him down for long.
Dylan Harper was among those impressed by how quickly the Spurs star bounced back.
“He’s Superman,” Harper said of Wembanyama. “I mean, he rolls an ankle and pops right up and acts like nothing happened. I’ve never seen (anything) like that.”
The ankle incident fit into a bigger picture that Wembanyama has been building since arriving in the NBA in 2023. He has made durability part of the job, spending significant time with the Spurs’ training and development staff before games and in practice to stretch and keep his body as flexible as possible.
Sometimes that work happens barefoot. He uses elastic bands and tennis balls, and he’ll even walk to his postgame press conferences without shoes so he can feel the floor under him. For Wembanyama, it’s all deliberate.
“Big men have always had feet problems,” Wembanyama said during his recently aired interview with 60 Minutes. “Feet are responsible for so much ... if you’ve got good foot strength, which brings good foot posture, everything else can develop the right way.”
He said good foot posture helps his knees, hips and back, and he believes it also plays a major role in how his ankles hold up. Wembanyama said he has trained that part of his body specifically for moments like the one he faced Wednesday night.
“The thing your body won’t forgive you for is if you go through a range you’ve never been before,” Wembanyama said, per San Antonio Express-News reporter Tom Orsborn, “but I’ve trained my ankles. They’ve been through these ranges before, so it’s not new.”
That showed up again Friday against the Sacramento Kings at Golden 1 Center. With 34 seconds left in the first half of San Antonio’s 124-109 NBA Cup win, Wembanyama landed awkwardly after Domantas Sabonis closed out on his 3-point attempt from the left wing and stepped into his landing space, drawing a Flagrant 1 foul. Wembanyama grabbed his left ankle, which buckled on the way down.
He got up even faster this time and kept going, finishing his fourth 30-point game of the season.
Mitch Johnson said he couldn’t speak to the medical side of it, but he made clear what he has seen from Wembanyama behind the scenes.
“Not my field of expertise,” Johnson said, “but I do know he puts more time into his preparation and into his body and recovery ... than anybody I’ve ever seen. Clearly he is helping himself, I guess, as much as he can.”
After the Dallas game, Wembanyama said the ankle roll stood out to him because it underscored the physical toll San Antonio had to absorb to keep pushing toward its sixth straight win. He wasn’t asked to identify a signature moment on Friday.
His teammates, though, already had one in mind: the way he keeps getting back up.
“That’s a testament to how he takes care of his body,” Harper said after San Antonio’s win over Dallas. “How he focuses on his mobility (and) treatment. He’s able to do things like that.”
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