Victor Wembanyama's First Interview of 2025

Victor Wembanyama does not hedge.

The line that lands hardest in this 43-second Nike clip is also the simplest: "The NBA players are the 400 best players in the world. I think I'm one of the best in the world."

No qualifier. No "hopefully" or "I'm working toward it." Just a 20-year-old telling you exactly what he believes.

He also said something worth sitting with: being too confident is a problem, but it's not the kind of problem that holds you back. That's a real distinction. Overconfidence can cost you games, make you skip film sessions, ignore your teammates. But it won't kill your ceiling. Underconfidence will. Wemby seems to understand this intuitively — which is either the sign of someone who's thought hard about the psychology of elite competition, or someone who was just built differently from the start.

Probably both.

His stats so far back up every word.

The format here is unusual. This isn't a standard sit-down with a journalist. The questions come from other athletes and people in Wemby's orbit — which gives the whole thing a different texture.

One of them is Léon Marchand, the French swimmer who won four individual gold medals at Paris 2024. He asks Wemby what it means to be at the avant-garde of his sport.

Wemby's response is honest in a funny way. He basically says: your question is better than my answer. "My answer is not as deep as that," he admits. "I lost my innocence."

That line — I lost my innocence — is doing a lot of work. It suggests he came into the league with a certain purity of vision about basketball, and somewhere in the grind of an NBA season, some of that got worn down. That's not a complaint. It's just true. The game changes you whether you want it to or not.

Two generational athletes. Two different sports. One 43-second video. It works.

At one point Wemby says "Pas de Danks" — twice, with real satisfaction.

If you don't follow him closely, that might sound like noise. It's not. "Pas de Danks" is the name of his Nike signature shoe. The phrase is a play on French — pas de means "no" or "none of" — and it's very Wemby: slightly cryptic, not explained, delivered like you should already know.

The shoe is real and you can find it here.

This is part of what makes him an interesting commercial figure. He doesn't pitch. He just references his own world and leaves the door open for you to follow him in. It's the same energy as his game — long, alien, operating at a frequency that takes a second to tune into.

Nike built this whole "Episode" series around that. This is Episode 3. The "Never 2 without 3" tagline in the description is a French expression — the idea that things come in threes. They're treating these annual interview drops like seasons of a show.

Smart move.

There's a throwaway line in the middle — someone asks about Maryland, and Wemby says "I don't know if I'm ready for that."

Without more context from the full interview, it's hard to know exactly what he means. Could be a specific game, a trip, a moment he's being asked about. The full interview is on Nike's YouTube channel if you want to dig in.

But the tone of it is interesting. He's not performing certainty about everything. He admits gaps — "my answer is not as deep as that," "I don't know if I'm ready" — and these sit right next to the moments of complete conviction about his place among the best players alive.

That combination is unusual. Most athletes either project confidence across the board or hedge everything. He does neither. He knows exactly where he's sure of himself and exactly where he isn't.

The Ringer's Wemby file is the best running record of how this is all developing if you want the longer read.

The clip closes with Wemby speaking French directly to camera: "C'est Victor Emaniema. Bienvenue dans ma première interview d'année." — "This is Victor Wembanyama. Welcome to my first interview of the year."

He says his full name. He does not say "Wemby." It's a small thing, but it matters. The nickname is for everyone else. The full name is his.

Nike has figured out something real here. This format — short, strange, athlete-controlled, built like a recurring show — fits him better than any traditional ad campaign would. You can follow him on X if you want to see how he behaves outside the Nike frame.

He's 20 years old, on a max contract, and already operating like someone who understands the difference between their public image and their actual self.

Episode 4 will be interesting.