PARIS — The Louvre closes to the public on Tuesdays, which is the only reason an NBA team could walk its galleries without becoming a spectacle. Victor Wembanyama arranged the visit anyway. He arranged most of what happened in Paris this August.
Six teammates flew to Nanterre for voluntary workouts: Stephon Castle, Dylan Harper, De’Aaron Fox, Harrison Barnes, Tobias Harris, Jordan McLaughlin. They trained twice a day and pushed each other through shooting sessions and film work, then spent off-hours the way teams do when they actually want to be in the same room. On one of those off-hours, as Bleacher Report documented, their 22-year-old franchise center took them to see the Mona Lisa.
None of it was required. That is the point.
San Antonio lost the 2026 NBA Finals to the New York Knicks in five games. The Spurs were good enough to get there, but nobody expected a third-year team anchored by a 22-year-old to push through the Western Conference the way they did. The Knicks, led by Jalen Brunson, were better when it counted. The margin was not a crisis. It was a lesson. The question the franchise spent its summer with was not whether to rebuild. It was whether Wembanyama had learned enough from those five games to lead the next attempt differently.
The Paris workouts suggest he has.
Spurs CEO R.C. Buford said publicly that Wembanyama organized the sessions, reached out to teammates personally, and set the training agenda. For context: Wembanyama averaged 25 points, 11.5 rebounds and 3.1 blocks per game last season, won the Defensive Player of the Year award unanimously, the first player in league history to do so, and accepted $51 million below his maximum contract so San Antonio could build a contender around him. He is already among the most dominant players the sport has produced. He spent his summer calling teammates and asking them to fly to France.
That shift, from individual excellence toward something harder to box-score, is what the Spurs need from him now. Castle, the 21-year-old point guard who flashed All-Star potential in his sophomore season, was among the most engaged in the Paris sessions. Harper, the Spurs’ first-round pick from last June’s draft, was the youngest in the group. He was not the least competitive.
Barnes and Wembanyama also trained with a French rugby club in Provence, actual contact drills and not a promotional appearance, according to Bleacher Report. What a 7-foot-4 center takes from rugby tackling sessions is anyone’s guess. The broader point is that Wembanyama spent his offseason approaching physical preparation the way some players approach the trade deadline: methodically, leaving nothing unconsidered.
Oscar Wembanyama, Victor’s 19-year-old brother and a 6-foot-7 forward at SIG Strasbourg in France’s top professional division, joined several of the Nanterre sessions. Victor was also named France’s captain for 2027 FIBA World Cup qualifying this summer, adding formal responsibilities on top of the informal leadership he has already assumed within the Spurs.
The Spurs return to Paris on January 14, when they host the New Orleans Pelicans at the Accor Arena in a regular-season game on the 2026-27 NBA schedule. For Wembanyama, who grew up in Le Chesnay just outside the city and shaped his game at ASVEL in Lyon, the matchup carries something beyond promotional value. It will be the particular experience of performing, under an NBA spotlight, in the place that made him.
Training camp opens on September 29. The Knicks have the same championship core they brought into June. The Spurs have a 22-year-old who spent the summer developing something that does not appear in any statistic.
What remains unknown is whether the work Castle and Harper absorbed will carry over when Brunson has the ball in a meaningful fourth quarter, and whether Wembanyama’s refined footwork will translate against the defenders who contained him in the Finals. Championship experience cannot be replicated in an August gym. The Knicks have it. The Spurs do not yet.
What the Paris summer suggests is that Wembanyama is no longer trying to close that gap alone.
