Amen Thompson skied over Victor Wembanyama and swatted his potential game-tying shot away clean with 0.6 seconds left, and if the only clip you watched this morning is Wemby’s 25 points and 13 rebounds, you watched the wrong possession.
That block, not some late offensive flourish, is the actual reason the Houston Rockets are 2-0 after a 114-110 win over the San Antonio Spurs in Austin. Everyone is going to credit Alperen Sengun instead, and they are not wrong to — he scored 29 points and ripped off eight straight for Houston in the fourth quarter, exactly the stretch that gets replayed on every highlight show by lunchtime according to the game recap. It just is not the possession that tells you anything real about what this Rockets team is.
That possession happened with the game on the line, up two, time for exactly one shot. Head coach Ime Udoka switched the 6-foot-7 Thompson onto Wembanyama, the 7-foot-4 centerpiece the Spurs built their whole rebuild around, instead of sending size at size. Wembanyama caught it clean, with a runway to the rim.
Thompson met him there anyway.
No foul, no goaltending whistle, just a 23-year-old guard rising up and erasing a shot that by every replay since should not have been his to take. Thompson finished with a 20-point, 10-rebound double-double, two steals and two blocks to go with it. Fred VanVleet scooped the loose ball off the deflection and calmly hit two free throws to put the Rockets-Spurs final score at 114-110.
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Kevin Durant, who had 20 points, 7 rebounds and 6 assists in the win, watched the whole thing from the floor and still sounded stunned about it afterward, saying “It’s insane how he got up so quickly to block that shot against a 7’5” guy being 6’7”,” before calling Thompson “just a freak athlete.”
Wembanyama did not dress up his own autopsy. Asked afterward if he would have done anything differently on the final possession, he gave the most Wembanyama answer available.
“Yes. I would have dunked the ball.”
Dylan Harper, who scored 20 of his own and threw down a driving dunk with 46 seconds left to help set up the finish, called the block “a freakish athletic play” and admitted “that’s one out of a million times that I think anyone’s going to do that.” He is right, and that one-out-of-a-million guy is already on Houston’s roster on purpose — the Rockets backed that belief with the $208 million bet Houston just made on him over the summer, and plays like Thompson’s game-winning block are the entire argument for why.
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None of this works if Sengun does not stay hot, or if the guy who chose Houston over everyone else spends his nights hunting his own shot instead of setting up four other guys. A two-point road win over a team that is now 0-2 is not proof of anything by itself. But the Rockets were built to win with size, defense and multiple playmakers instead of one superstar scorer, and San Antonio, which also lost its opener to Oklahoma City 116-104, just found out what that bet looks like when a 25-point, 13-rebound night from the best prospect in basketball still is not enough.
Wembanyama said it himself. He would have dunked. He didn’t get the chance.
