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With the amount of attention San Antonio Spurs rookie Victor Wembanyama has been getting for virtually his entire career, there are bound to be some people who hate on him. Or, at the very least, people who think he’ll end up being a bust in the NBA relative to the expectations that have been set for him.
The hype around Wembanyama is unlike anything the NBA has seen since LeBron James, and before even stepping foot on the court for the Spurs, people are looking at him as a generational talent. But former NBA big man Olden Polynice isn’t one of those people.
During an appearance on Fox Sports Radio’s “The Odd Couple,” Polynice said that Wembanyama should “hope” to be as good as Shawn Bradley and isn’t even in the conversation of Yao Ming yet. (H/t Jeff Garcia of KENS 5)
“He hopes to be better than Shawn Bradley in my opinion. I’m serious,” Polynice said. “I’m not even putting him in the Yao Ming category right now.”
Polynice says that players of Wembanyama’s height are nothing more than shot-blockers and that he could struggle to play at the level he was playing at in France in the NBA.
“Guy like that they’re over 7-5 and just shot blockers,” said Polynice. “He’s going to try to do all the stuff he was doing overseas. It’s going to be very difficult for him to do in the NBA.”
Without knowing how much film Polynice has watched or how many games of Wembanyama’s he’s seen, this take reeks of a person who has looked at a person’s height and made an assumption from that.
Everything Wembanyama has done says that he’ll be great in the NBA. Just because he’s tall doesn’t mean he should be pigeonholed into a role that other tall players have played.
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