Tre Jones has spent most of his life as a point guard. He thought he knew the basic rules of the position.
Among them: Under no circumstances should you throw an alley-oop pass to a player who is still standing behind the 3-point line.
Then Victor Wembaneyama came to Spurs and all the old rules went out the window at the Frostbank Centre.
“You can see how he adjusts his height and height,” Jones said. “If you spit it out, he can go get it again and again.”
Jones put that new belief to the ultimate test Friday in the first half of the Spurs’ 120-104 preseason win over Miami.
At the moment Jones decided to throw the alley-oop pass, Wenbanyama still had his size 20 1/2 Nike on the other side of the 3-point arc.
If the target had been anyone other than the Spurs’ 7-foot-3 rookie alien, a pass would have been sent to the popcorn vendor.
Instead, Wembaneyama finished cutting to the basket, caught the ball, and completed a simple dunk with time to spare.
“I was trying to get it up in the air so no one else could get close to it,” Jones said. “He was making easy dunks before we knew it.”
At that moment, a collective gasp could be heard from the crowd of 17,412 at Frostbank Center. Jones was less awed than he was a month ago.
“It’s becoming pretty common,” Jones said. “He makes weird plays like that every day and night.”
This is Wenbanyama’s rub.
For the Spurs, the addition of the 19-year-old changed the geography of the court, warped the laws of physics and forced NBA viewers from all walks of life to rethink what’s possible.
For Wenbanyama, that meant watching his new teammates go through the process of learning how to play with unicorns.
“My teammates are learning to play with me because they’re surprised at what I can do,” Wenbanyama said Friday after scoring 23 points in 23 minutes. “I’m in the best league in the world right now. The players are just learning quickly.”
Still, it may take another beat for the rest of the Spurs to understand the world in which a player at the 3-point line can go for a lob dunk.
In that respect, Wenbanyama is a passionate teacher.
He’s already talking with his teammates about how to throw an alley-oop. His main guideline seems to be, “Keep the ball somewhere near the gym.”
“It’s rarely an issue of the ball being thrown too high,” Wenbanyama said.
Wenbanyama provided bucketloads of eureka moments on Friday.
On one play, he took a fast-break pass from Jeremy Sochan, sprinted through defenders, and dunked without dribbling or leaving the floor.
In the other game, Wembaneyama received a pass from Devin Vassell and used every angle of his wingspan to fire a long left-handed slam from six feet away over a thicket of Miami players.
Erik Spoelstra of the Heat has coached LeBron James, Dwyane Wade, and Chris Bosh. He had never seen anything like the exhibition Wenbanyama held on Friday.
“The way he dunks, he’s not even jumping,” Spoelstra said. “I feel like I did the same thing to my 5-year-old son the other day.”
Wenbanyama added four assists, four rebounds and three blocks to his nightly tally. After one of these refusals, a guard named Heywood Highsmith, who was hit by Miami player Wenban Yama, broke down in astonished laughter.
What did Spoelstra learn from seeing Wenbanyama in person on an NBA court for the first time?
“For all the hype, it feels like the real thing,” Spoelstra said.
Meanwhile, Wembaneyama’s own coach is still thinking about what to do with him.
Gregg Popovich started a rookie at power forward on Friday, just as he did in the Spurs’ preseason opener loss to Oklahoma City. But this time, Wenbanyama also took some time to focus on strategy.
For the most part, Popovich allows his teenage phenoms to sow their oats without much interference from coaches.
On Friday, the Spurs called just one designed play against Wembang Yama. He made an uncontested dunk as the defender went down.
“It was a good decision,” Popovich said with a tense look on his face. “It depends on who has the ball.”
All of this is new for his Wenbanyama teammates. They routinely learn by playing alongside players who test everything they thought they knew about the game.
“The biggest thing is trust,” Vassell said. “Sometimes he comes down and brings (the ball) up. When you see somebody bring it up the court on a 7-on-4, most of the time you’re (thinking) to go get it. But he can do it himself.”
Vassell scored 21 points on Friday and made six 3-pointers. Two of those came off assists from Wenbanyama and passes from Miami double teams.
“He’s going to make the game a lot easier for us,” Vassell said. “And we have to make the game easy for him.”
The play that ended with Jones’ lob to Wembang Yama began in unconventional fashion with the 6-foot-2 point guard setting a screen for his taller teammate at the right arc.
Wembaneyama dribbled off the pick, passed the ball to Jones near the top of the key, and cut toward the hoop with long strides that fluttered around the City block.
From there, all Jones had to do was fight his instincts and throw a pass to a player who was still six feet away from where he was aiming.
“For him to turn that into a dunk is crazy,” Jones said.
Crazy has become the new normal for the Spurs.
They might get used to this. There is no other choice.
“We’re all trying to figure this out,” Vassell said with a big smile. “Trust me, it’s fun.”