ON THE LEFT block, just a short skip from the rim, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander found something fleeting, something rare, something that appeared to be a glitch in the San Antonio Spurs ' vise grip defense that had hounded him all night with ferocious double-teams: A wide-open look. With 8:30 remaining in the fourth quarter of Game 1 of the Western Conference finals, the Oklahoma City Thunder guard had snuck behind the defensive wall and seemed primed to score his easiest points of the night.
Then something strange happened. Gilgeous-Alexander began his shooting motion, while Spurs' star center Victor Wembanyama -- who stands 7-foot-4 inches tall and possesses a mind-boggling 8-foot wingspan -- stood a few feet away, beneath the rim, resigned to the fact that it was too late to try to block the shot, much less even contest it.
Still, he raised one of his cartoonishly long arms, his eyes tracking the ball toward the basket. The ball barely grazed the side of the rim, and Wembanyama devoured the rebound.
Gilgeous-Alexander tried to wrestle the ball from Wembanyama, who laughed in return at a player who is nearly a foot shorter. In the Spurs' nail-biting 122-115 double-overtime win, the play amounted to a forgettable footnote, especially given Wembanyama's otherworldly stat line: 41 points and 24 rebounds.
In the box score, it would register as nothing more than a missed shot and a rebound. But the play itself marked one of numerous instances that take place throughout the course of a game when Wembanyama's mere presence evokes something analytics staffers across the league told ESPN that they struggle to accurately quantify.
It represents what might well be Wembanyama's greatest and most dominant trait, these analytics staffers say. "As long as I've been in the NBA, I think it's something that we've always talked about," one Western Conference analytics staffer told ESPN.
"How do you measure fear?" IN THE CATWALKS above the court in all 30 arenas across the NBA, 20 high-tech cameras track 29 points on every player's body 60 times per second throughout every game, providing billions of data points throughout every season. That player tracking data is then fed into advanced artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms to generate statistics that go far beyond the typical box score.
Today, analytics staffers say they're able to deduce more than ever about the intricacies of the game, especially on offense. But they say defensive impact remains a comparative mystery, where schematic nuances can cloud accurate measurement.
"On defense, you could do everything right and the guy could make an impossible shot on you," the Western Conference analytics staffer said. "You could do everything wrong and the guy could miss a very easy shot.
But how do you determine who was most responsible for that?" A defensive player could have a high blow-by rate, one Eastern Conference analytics staffer said, meaning players he is guarding tend to "blow by" him toward the lane. But perhaps that rate is a product of a defensive scheme designed to run shooters off the 3-point line and funnel them toward a shot-blocking center in the paint.
While starring for the University of San Francisco in the 1950s, Bill Russell became the first player to utilize the blocked shot as a defensive weapon. First, Russell blocked his teammates' shots in practice to the point that some stopped driving through the lane at all.
Then he did the same to opponents, who, after getting