Here’s the best news from week 18 in the NBA, and other news from around the world of basketball.
🚨 Zaccharie Risacher and Alexandre Sarr are projected top 1 and 2 in the 2024 Draft! (19/02)
🔮 The ESPN Mock Draft is a projection of this year’s NBA Draft, which will take place on 26 and 27 June 2024.
💥🇫🇷 Frenchmen Zaccharie Risacher and Alexandre Sarr have been announced as the top two draft picks for the time being. That’s not all, other French players have also been announced.
🔥 This is the case for Tidjane Salaun (8th place), Melvin Ajinca (31st) and Pacome Dadiet (47th). This remains only provisional and it is also the lottery that will determine the precise places of our Frenchmen depending on the teams and their needs.
🔥Victor Wembanyama becomes an ambassador for luxury brand Louis Vuitton! (20/02)
💬 Victor says: « For me, it made a lot of sense to be associated with LV. You know, French excellence. Expertise is something I’m very attracted to ».
🇫🇷 Wemby summed it up, French excellence teaming up with French excellence, nothing could be more natural.
👔 In fact, the Spurs player had regularly been seen wearing outfits by the French brand and his suit for the Draft was also designed by Vuitton.
🔥 Julie Allemand will play with the Los Angeles Sparks for the 2024 WNBA season! (20/02)
🏖️ The Belgian player from Lyon-Villeurbanne will head to the American West in May to play the next WNBA season in the uniform of the Sparks after playing the last season with the Chicago Sky.
🇧🇪 Allemand made a major contribution to the Belgians Cats’ qualification for the Olympic Games last week at the TQO. She is also the 2023 European champion with the Belgian team and was voted into the tournament’s top five.
☀️ This season, she is playing for Lyon-Villeurbanne alongside French players Marine Johannes and Gabby Williams, who also play in the WNBA in the summer. The players will leave France just after the LFB finals to cross the Atlantic.
🥶 Durant thought his career was over after injury in 2019 Finals! (21/02)
🩼 NBA Finals Game 5, Toronto’s Scotiabank Arena, 10 June 2019, Warriors-Raptors, Kevin Durant collapses to the floor after initiating a motion. The Warriors winger has just suffered one of the worst possible injuries for a basketball player, an achilles tear.
💬 Durant says: « At that moment, I knew my story with the Warriors was probably over. There were 20,000 people in the room and I heard a ‘pop’…my career flashed in front of my eyes. Everything I’ve achieved, everything I’ve thought, my good times, my bad times. (…) If you look closely, you can see that my eyes are lost in the crowd…because I tell myself that it’s over for me » (@boardroom)
🙏 Luckily for Slim Reaper fans, Kevin Durant returns 18 months later in a Brooklyn Nets uniform on 22 December 2020. Like a symbol, the Nets hosted the Warriors at the Barclays Center and won the game 125-99. Durant, at 22 points in 15 minutes, seemed to sweep away his last bad memories in the blue and yellow Bay jersey.
😳 Where is Paul George goint to play next season ? (22/02)
🧨 Paul George, 33, in his fifth year in Los Angeles, has a player option on his 2024-2025 season allowing him to either stay with the Clippers or become a free agent and sign wherever the wind takes him.
😱 OKC would be next in line and Sam Presti would have left some salary room to sign PG this summer according to Andy Bailey. He had in fact worn the colours of the Thunder for 2 seasons before being traded to Los Angeles for a promising young player at the time, none other than Shai Gilgeous-Alexander!
🤯 PG would also be tempted by a return to his beloved franchise where he played 7 seasons, the Indiana Pacers (according to Jack Fisher). There are « growing rumours » that the American winger would be interested in playing alongside Tyrese Haliburton.
🏖️ But let’s wait until the end of the Clippers’ season, which will surely determine whether Paul George activates his player option to stay in California. If not, the hunt will be on for PG!
😳 Wemby just misses out on the five-by-five! (23/02)
5️⃣ The Five-By-Five is a term used to designate a line of stats with 5 units greater than or equal to 5.
🏀 Hakeem Olajuwon has scored the most five-by-fives in history with 6, followed by Andrei Kirilenko with 3. The 4 active players to have achieved one are Draymond Green, Anthony Davis, Jusuf Nurkic and… our Nicolas Batum in 2012.
🤯 Victor therefore accumulated this night: 19 points, 13 rebounds, 4 assists, 5 blocks, 5 steals. He was just one assist short of a Five-by-five.
❌ As so often… Spurs lose to the Kings 127-122. It’s the 9th defeat in the last 10 games for Gregg Popovich’s team.
🔥 Jokic makes history again! (23/02)
🌟 No more All Star Weekend and performances in a vacuum, Jokic did some Jokic tonight against Washington in a night that will go down as doubly historic for the Serbian pivot!
📊 21 points, 19 rebounds, 15 assists, 10/10 shooting, +23 +/-: that was Nikola Jokic’s phenomenal stat line as he put the Wizards under his spell.
2️⃣9️⃣ With this triple-double against Washington, the Nuggets’ pivot has achieved at least 1 against every team in the league. He is the third player in history to reach this milestone after LeBron James and Russell Westbrook.
🔥 It’s also the first game with at least 20 points, 15 rebounds and 15 assists on 100% shooting in league history!
🔥7 wins in a row for Dallas! (23/02)
⚔️ The Doncic-Booker duel sparkled again last night for an electric Mavericks-Suns. A 10-3 regular season record for the Arizona player against the Slovenian but tonight Dallas smothered Phoenix.
📊 41 points, 9 rebounds, 11 assists, 4 steals for Luka Doncic who missed the triple-double for a single unit, for the 34th time in his career. 29 points, 5 rebounds, 11/18 shooting for Kyrie Irving. The two Dallas guards have never looked so good together since the start of 2024.
7️⃣ This 7th consecutive victory for the magical duo teammates equals the Texas franchise’s longest winning streak since 2011, under the Nowitzki era.
6️⃣ Dallas have just overtaken Phoenix to snatch 6th place in the Western Conference standings, which means direct qualification for the play-offs.
🤯 A high school quintuple-double! (23/02)
😳 Some stat lines are absurd, and Kieonna Chirstmas’ is totally one of them. The player in her final year at Fonda-Fultonville prep school in New Jersey simply pulled off a quintuple double.
📊 11 points, 20 rebounds, 11 assists, 10 counters, 10 steals: that’s what you might call the outrageous domination of the game. By the way, Christmas’s performance dates back to December but was only discovered this week.
🔥 This is only the 13th time in the history of high school basketball that an athlete has achieved this remarkable achievement. No professional player, in Europe or the NBA, has ever been able to pull off a quintuple double except Wilt Chamberlain according to rumours in 1968.
😳 Wemby pulled out a five-by-five ! (24/02)
🔥 The Five-By-Five refers to a stats line with 5 or more units. Wemby was just one pass away from achieving it the night before last with 19 points, 13 rebounds, 4 assists, 5 counters, 5 steals.
📊 Last night: 27 points, 10 rebounds, 8 assists, 5 steals, 5 counters. So that’s a five-by-five in the rule book in just 31 minutes of play in a defeat unfortunately as often.
👽 It was his 51st NBA game, making him the earliest player ever to complete a 5×5. The previous record was Hakeem Olajuwon in his 205th game.
💥 Wemby joins the list of four active players to have completed a 5×5, who are Draymond Green, Anthony Davis, Jusuf Nurkic and Nicolas Batum. That gives us two French players on this list, Cocorico!
👑 Wemby was adored by LeBron James who tweeted « This kid is special 👽 ». Like it? It’s French!
Eliott Caillot 