Victor Wembanyama might have just taken over the basketball world in the first game of the season

Late in the first half of the San Antonio Spurs’ 125-92 blowout win over the Dallas Mavericks on Wednesday, Victor Wembanyama faced PJ Washington on the right wing. He fired in a simulated manner. Washington bit. And what Wembanyama did next was, if you hadn’t actually seen it with your own eyes, truly incredible.

A 7-foot-5 human being took one dribble before launching into a double-pump, up-and-down, damn near reverse dunk…in traffic…on the other side of the rim.

“A figment of our basketball imagination!” was the first call submission of the year from ESPN play-by-play announcer Ryan Ruocco, and honestly, those were the only words that could have been nearly enough in that moment. It was a perfect call for what could be a perfect, honest-to-God basketball player.

Words like “incredible” are too easily thrown around in NBA parlance. Usually, it’s not a truly amazing game that’s described – at least not for athletes of this caliber. But let me tell you something, that was amazing. Honestly, Wembanyama’s whole evening was incredible. Dude scored 40 points on 15-for-21 shooting, plus 15 rebounds, three blocks and was a game-high plus-31 in just 29 minutes.

Of course, we’ve seen numbers like these before. However, in combination it’s a different story. Wembanyama is the first player since the 1977-78 NBA/ABA merger to record 40 points and 15 rebounds while shooting 70 percent from the field with no turnovers.

But forget the numbers. What we saw Wednesday night cannot be quantified on a stat sheet. It was, and still is, athletic evolution personified, a human skyscraper snatching shots out of the air like a dinosaur picking fruit – carelessly reaching and violently diving on some of the biggest men on the planet as if they were schoolchildren, pushing the ball in transition and whipping no-look passes to the corner, all while making step-back four-point plays and one-foot kissing shots on the glass and generally operating with the footwork and ball skills of a 6-foot point guard.

Before Victor Wembanyama, a film like this did not exist.

I don’t even know where to start, but maybe I should have started with the fact that he was doing this against Anthony Davis, perhaps the best defensive man in the world not named Wembanyama. Davis committed four fouls in the first half while trying to keep up with Wembanyama. He was helpless. If you watched the entire highlights above, you’ve already seen this, but just in case you haven’t, watch this shake down Wemby put on Davis.

Come on, man. You can’t play better defense than that and it doesn’t matter at all. Wembanyama was ranked #5 in this season’s Top 100 players and that already seems ridiculously low. It was always a matter of time before Wembanyama became the best player in the world, of course, but no one thought that moment would come so soon.

Maybe not. Maybe it was a game. But maybe not. In fact, I would lean towards the latter. Marrying that skill level with that type of size is a given in basketball. I’ve never seen anything like it. Nobody did it. I don’t care if you grew up with Wilt Chamberlain or if you think Ralph Sampson would have been this if he grew up in that era.

Any way you slice it, it’s entirely new. And the guy is only 21 years old. Amazing. Literally, amazing. Victor Wembanyama, man. The basketball world is yours.