The first game Wilt Chamberlain ever played at Madison Square Garden also happened to be the first game he ever played in the NBA. That was the evening of Oct. 24, 1959, in front of a feisty crowd of 15,527 fans at the Old Garden on 50th Street. He was the most-hyped basketball player to ever enter the league, and the league knew where he should make his debut.
He was magnificent, of course, scoring 43 points, adding 28 rebounds, powering the Philadelphia Warriors to a 118-109 win over the Knicks, moving Knicks coach Fuzzy Levane to say, “The big kid, he’s going to be a problem for a long time.”
Ten years and eight days later, on another Saturday night, this time inside the sparkling new Garden on top of Penn Station, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar had a similar coming-out party, but this one came with a whirl of emotions filling the 19,500 who packed the place.
For Jabbar, still known as Lew Alcindor, was a native, the greatest basketball talent New York had ever developed. He was cheered when he was introduced, cheered when he scored his first basket — a sky hook early in the first quarter — and the spectators were able to feel good about their charity since the Knicks beat the Bucks 112-108 — the fifth straight win in what would grow to a record 18-game winning streak by month’s end.
“I appreciated the cheers,” Alcindor said afterward, before turning glum. “But I missed too many shots down the stretch.”
Like Chamberlain and Jabbar before him, Victor Wembanyama comes to the Garden as the NBA’s Next Big Thing when he and his San Antonio Spurs take on the Knicks on Wednesday night. Unlike those other two — and so many of the other instant-impact players across the years, the Pistol Petes and the Jordans and the Hakeems and the Shaqs — there isn’t even a slight air of mystery about him.
Chamberlain had risen to prominence in a time when college basketball had minimal TV coverage, and his Kansas Jayhawks never came any closer to the Garden then when he was in college than a game at St. Joseph’s, in his native Philadelphia, as a junior. Jabbar was on TV a lot when he was at UCLA, and played two games at the Garden as a junior (against Holy Cross and Boston College on back-to-back nights in late January) and then three more the next year when the Bruins swept to the Holiday Festival championship by thrashing Providence, Princeton and St. John’s.
People knew about Chamberlain. They knew about Jabbar. But there was still enough mystery attached to them that their Garden appearances were genuine moments.
There is little mystery attached to Wembanyama, even if he never played a second of American college basketball. But the 7-foot-4 Frenchman has been a staple of social media for three years, and for the true aficionados every time a new video of him dropped on TikTok the last few years when he was playing for Asvel and Metropolitans 92, it was treated like a sacrament.
And with good reason.
“He’s different, man,” said Kevin Durant, after his Suns lost both ends of a back-to-back against Wembanyama and the Spurs last week — both games in Phoenix, no less. “He’s long, athletic, mobile. He can shoot it. He’s got skills. He’s tough.”
Durant is the one who dubbed Kristaps Porzingis a “unicorn” before anyone else did, and even with Porzingis’ up-and-down career that description was fairly dead on. But Wembanyama is far more polished than Porzingis was when he entered the league, and his fellow players already see that.
“He is one of a kind, as we all know,” said the Clippers’ Russell Westbrook, whom Wembanyama grew up idolizing.
So far, so good. The Spurs are a surprising 3-4 (though they were drubbed by 41 points at Indiana on Monday night). Wembanyama has been terrific: 19.1 points per game, 46.2 percent shooting. And he had that 38-point, 10-rebound outburst against Durant’s Suns last week where he also shot 3-for-6 on 3s.
The Garden won’t be putting Wembanyama’s name on the billboard Wednesday — but, then, it waited a year to do that with George Mikan, too, who quietly scored 34 in his NBA debut in New York on Nov. 11, 1948. Within a year it was different, and the marquee famously advertised “GEO MIKAN V/S KNICKS.”
Within a year, it may be different for Wembanyama, too.
