When Victor Wembanyama steps onto a basketball court, its geometry changes. Vincent Collet, Wembanyama’s coach with Metropolitans 92 during his final season in France, has witnessed the phenomenon. An opposing team can choreograph the perfect sequence of screens and passes, springing a shooter into open air with the rim in his sights. Then Wembanyama—7-foot-4, with the arms of an even taller man and the quick stride of a smaller one—enters the frame.

“You think you are alone,” Collet said in a recent interview. “And then, he’s back.”