Wembanyama and a Summer in Provence: How the Spurs Learned to Breathe Again

In Aix-en-Provence, on a July morning, the training ground of Provence Rugby gained a silhouette that did not belong there. Standing 2.24 meters tall, weighing roughly 95 kilograms, Victor Wembanyama stood by the touchline, watching rugby players crash into each other during a contact drill. He did not run. He did not lift. He simply stood there, eyes fixed on how a forward kept his balance when dragged down by two men, and how a player fell to the ground and stood back up without anyone's hand to help.

I have watched many practices in thirty-six years in this trade. I have seen stars shoot three thousand threes a day. I have seen centers spend an entire summer in the weight room adding five kilograms of muscle. But the image of a basketball player a full head taller than everyone around him, standing still on a rugby pitch in the south of France, is the one that made me stop longest in many months.

Wembanyama's gaze did not belong to any game. It belonged to the moment a young man relearns how his own body falls to the ground.

The 2026-25 season ended for Wembanyama in February, right at its peak. A blood clot in his right shoulder — a deep vein thrombosis — forced the San Antonio Spurs to shut him down after less than half the journey. The team lost its defensive anchor, its offensive leader, the light the entire league had grown used to watching. From then until April, the Spurs played like a body missing its spine.

February was also the month San Antonio made one of the biggest moves of the trade window: De'Aaron Fox arrived from Sacramento in a three-team deal, bringing Harrison Barnes along. The Spurs added a lead guard with verified playoff pressure and a veteran forward who understands how to live inside a system. Structurally, it was a shift from building around one man to building around a group.

The summer of 2026 is therefore the first summer in which the Spurs are no longer purely a young team. They have a recovering superstar, a lead guard in his prime years, a group of young players who need to learn how to win, and a coach who knows that time is not the enemy. But what they lack is not on a stat sheet. What they lack is a shared rhythm of breathing.

In thirty-six years of watching basketball, I have seen many teams try to buy cohesion with money. They hire psychologists, organize retreats, throw team dinners. Those things rarely survive past November. Real cohesion lives elsewhere: in the fact that a 22-year-old star pays out of his own pocket to fly to France, and two veteran teammates fly with him.

A team's cohesion is not built in a meeting room; it is built on mornings when no one forces anyone to show up.

Houston was the first leg. A private gym on the outskirts of the city, not belonging to the Spurs, without team cameras, without club medical staff standing by. Wembanyama chose it because he wanted to work without being counted. Over my career I have spent many hours waiting in the hallways of such facilities, and I learned one thing: when a star leaves the team's official facility to train, he is sending a message about ownership of his own body.

Paris was the second leg. Not for heavy training, but to relearn feeling. Light sessions, balance work, hip and ankle control. I had the chance to speak with a strength coach who had worked with European track and field athletes, and he told me a sentence I kept: The tallest athletes rarely lose because of a lack of strength. They lose because they never learned how to brake.

That is why Aix-en-Provence appears in this story. Provence Rugby is not a basketball club, and that is precisely the point. Rugby teaches something modern basketball no longer teaches enough: how to fall. In rugby, falling is a formally coached skill, from shoulder position, hip angle, to the first point of contact with the ground. A 120-kilogram rugby player falls thousands of times over a twelve-year career, and he learns how to make his body withstand that fall.

For a man 2.24 meters tall, the body was not designed for gravity. Every landing after a jump loads the knees, ankles, and spine with forces far beyond what a normal human absorbs. For years, professional basketball dealt with this simply: limit minutes, limit practices, limit jumps per week. But limits do not teach a body how to fall.

At 2.24 meters, the greatest risk to a career is not the jump, but the moment of landing — and modern basketball barely coaches that skill.

I have witnessed this in the flesh of others. Yao Ming, 2.29 meters, played eight All-Star-level seasons and saw his career end at 30 due to repeated foot and ankle injuries. Ralph Sampson, 2.24 meters, was one of the most feared players of the 1980s, and his knees could not hold. Bill Walton, a genius center with feet that were never whole. The list is long enough that I could write a book simply listing names.

But there is one exception worth revisiting: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. He played twenty seasons, until age 42. He was not the fastest or strongest. He was the one who learned to control his body best. Kareem practiced yoga when yoga was not yet popular in professional sport. He practiced balance work, breathing work, movements his peers considered a waste of time.

When I watched Wembanyama stand by the touchline at Provence Rugby, I thought of Kareem. I thought about how a long career is not built by steps forward, but by relearning the most basic things. In the drills with the rugby players, what Wembanyama encountered was not strength. He encountered balance while being pulled, reflexes when losing his center of gravity, how to lower his base without bending his back. None of that shows up in a box score. But it decides whether a man can play until thirty-five.

This is the point modern basketball often misses. We measure minutes, points, jumps, but we almost never measure a body's capacity to endure when it is out of control. And for players over 2.20 meters, being out of control is not an exception; it is a permanent state.

During that week in Provence, the gaze of the rugby coaches toward Wembanyama held something I rarely see in basketball gyms. They were curious. They pointed at his legs, exchanged words, nodded. One of them, from what I heard, said this player has the legs of a heavy-set athlete, except his body has never been taught to use them.

To me, that was the most precise compliment Wembanyama received all summer.

De'Aaron Fox's summer looked different. He came more than once, standing in a small stand, observing. For a 27-year-old lead guard who had just changed teams, summer is no longer about him. He showed up because the team has a young star who needs to know that what he is doing is not a private matter. In fifteen years sitting in press conferences, I have learned that declarations about team chemistry almost always stop at the level of declaration. But someone flying across the Atlantic to stand in a small, cramped stand — that is not a declaration. That is an action.

Harrison Barnes, 33, was the third. He is the kind of player the press often overlooks — not flashy, not explosive, not needing the spotlight. But Barnes has been in this league thirteen years and won a title once with Golden State. He knows exactly what a summer should look like. His presence in Provence, to me, is one of the least-mentioned but most important details of the story.

A young team does not need more voices. A young team needs someone who stands still and proves that this work is normal.

And on the other side of America, the New York Knicks are taking a completely different road. Their team does not need summer. They have had cohesion for years, and what they need in July is maintenance — keeping weathered bodies from collapsing before the season starts. The Knicks build on playoff experience. The Spurs build on time.

Two opposing models do not say which team is right. They say that an organization must choose between buying maturity and teaching it.

The Knicks might win a playoff series in 2026 because they already know how to win. The Spurs might win nothing for two years, but if things go right, they will win for ten. In the economics of professional sport, that is a bet few organizations have the stomach to place.

Spurs media day delivered a moment I think will be referenced again. Wembanyama spoke about his emotional processing in the months after the diagnosis. He did not talk about returning. He talked about learning to accept that his body might not function the way he wants. For a 22-year-old athlete, that is a confession far larger than its surface suggests.

I was at Luzhniki, in the press room, listening to players say similar things after injuries. I have been in many places and heard the same story. But what was different with Wembanyama is that he did not try to close the story with a promise. He left it open. In my industry, a star allowing a story to remain open is a rare form of courage.

The biology of a shoulder blood clot is unlike a muscle injury. Muscle heals along a straight line. A thrombosis does not heal on a straight line. It is a chronic condition, a live-with state, and it demands a new relationship between the player and his body. Any medical staff can prescribe. No medical staff can teach a man to forgive his own body.

This is where I want to place a doubt. Media always wants a return date. A day, a month, a milestone. But the body does not run on media schedules. Every time I see a headline like Wembanyama will return in October, I think about how we are forcing a human body into a timeline drawn by viewer need. The scariest thing about an injury is not the pain. It is that the patient starts to believe he must be faster than his own body.

At 52, I realized this later than many. But I have seen athletes come back too soon. I have seen them cry in locker rooms, not because they lost, but because they knew they had cheated themselves. A career does not end in a single moment. It ends in a chain of small moments no one records.

The most frightening innovation does not begin with an explosion; it begins with a deliberate silence. Wembanyama's summer in Houston, Paris, and Aix-en-Provence was such a silence. No viral video. No declarations. No special media session. Just people working together over a stretch of time no one needed to watch.

But there is another side to this story I must state. Stars organizing their own summers is a retreat from organizational control. And that has two sides. On one hand, it gives players ownership of their bodies and their development. On the other, it removes official medical oversight at the exact moment a player with a thrombosis history needs it most. No one can say for certain that training in Provence is safe for someone on anticoagulants.

I do not have enough information to conclude on safety. What I have is a question I think the league will face within a few years: as players grow richer and more independent, who is responsible when a personal decision becomes a collective disaster?

My answer leans in a different direction from the majority. I do not think the Spurs lost control. I think the Spurs are making a calculated bet on trust. An organization allowing a 22-year-old to freely fly to France and train with a rugby team sends a signal: we trust you to understand your body better than we do. In professional sport, trust is the most expensive and hardest-to-buy capital.

And trust, when given to the right person, returns as responsibility.

In my writing career I have spent years searching for moments when an athlete suddenly becomes another version of himself. I found it in Aleksandr Golovin's gaze at Luzhniki in 2026, running toward his coach like a child seeking a father. I found it in the empty stands of a training ground in Shanghai in 2026, when an entire football culture had to learn to play without applause. I found it in Roberto Mancini, unscrewing each bolt of fear without anyone hearing the sound.

I think I am finding it this time in Provence, in the standing stillness of a giant.

With no applause, a stadium reveals its skeleton: the seats, the pitch, and the longing. In Provence there was no stand to be empty. There was only grass, a fence, a few cars parked far away, and the sound of bodies colliding. This is the kind of ground modern basketball has nearly forgotten exists. It is where people train because they need to, not because someone paid to watch.

A rugby training ground in the south of France, on a July morning, is a place with little to sell. That is exactly why it is useful.

When Wembanyama left that grass, no one asked for a photo. No journalist waited outside the gate. He got in a car, went back to the hotel, and continued the next day. In thirty-six years of watching elite sport, I have learned that the summers that change a career are almost always the summers no one witnessed.

What I take from this whole story is not how strong the Spurs might become. It is a smaller, narrower observation, but to me a decisive one: a modern sports organization is testing a new model for nurturing talent. Instead of control, it grants authority. Instead of scheduling, it steps back. Instead of measuring, it trusts.

This model may fail. But if it succeeds, it will change how teams think about summer for a decade.

In basketball, we often praise those who run fast, jump high, shoot far. But there is another kind of skill the league rarely praises: the skill of waiting. The skill of stepping back. The skill of letting a 22-year-old find his own way to breathe.

If you ask me what I predict for the Spurs next season, I will not give a number. I will say that over many years, I have seen teams burn young talent through haste, and I have seen few teams dare to slow down. San Antonio chose slow this summer. For a player who once had a blood clot in his shoulder, slow is the only ethical choice. But slow is also a strategy — and in this case, it may be the best strategy the Spurs have.

At 52, I understand that the pitch is never straight; it bends with the patience of those who remain.

There is one question I want to leave for those who will follow the Spurs next season. When Wembanyama returns — and he will — we will look at his points, his minutes, his blocks. We will forget that a few months earlier he stood on a patch of grass in Provence, learning how to fall without breaking. We will forget that an athlete's career is sometimes decided by things no one measures. I hope, this time, we remember.

Basketball, after all, is a language. And like every language, it holds words only the patient learn.