One of the fun subplots of my beloved Knicks’ run to the NBA championship last season was that they did it against Victor Wembanyama. The Spurs’ gargantuan 22-year-old center, surely the first person on earth listed at 7-foot-4 to be accused of understating his height, is poised to dominate the league for decades. He’s the sort of player who comes along every quarter-century or so, the most likely heir to the Jordan-LeBron GOAT throne. This made the Knicks beating him, so early in his career, extra delicious: It made them, my team, forever a part of his story.
Wemby has called losing to New York “the most intense heartbreak moment in my career,” which means what he does from here will be driven by that loss. That will make the Knicks’ title even more special. The more success Wemby has, the better their magical title run will age.
That’s the power of Wemby: Every move he makes now essentially becomes part of a hero’s journey, the signature story of the National Basketball Association through the next two decades. The league is going to change; you’re going to get older; the world will spin. But Wemby is just going to keep becoming a bigger part of the NBA, American sports and pop culture. Every step he takes will reverberate. His words will echo louder and louder.
Which is why I wonder if an even bigger moment in Wemby’s career came quietly last month, when he was asked by a reporter if he would ever serve as a spokesperson for a prediction market or gambling app.
Throughout most of sports history, this would have been a ridiculous question. After all, legends Willie Mays and Mickey Mantle were once barred from Major League Baseball for serving as casino greeters after their playing days were over.
But in an age when leagues and networks have actually gone into business with the bookmakers, players have begun to appear in advertisements for prediction markets that allow fans to trade on games those players are playing in — most notably LeBron James for Polymarket and Giannis Antetokounmpo for Kalshi. Those are two of the most famous, beloved players in the NBA, and their prominent appearances in betting ads provide a clear permission structure for other athletes to follow their lead.
The conflicts here are obvious — LeBron occasionally even records videos of weekly NFL picks for Polymarket, which is an astounding thing for an active athlete to do. And that’s before one considers the long-term damage that widespread promotion of gambling will cause, particularly to young people. For months, I have seen advertisements for gambling upstart Underdog plastered on street signs outside high schools in my area. A 2025 Pew survey found that the percentage of adults under 30 who bet on sports online had more than doubled in three years, but I wonder if the figure is even higher now.
A reckoning — maybe it will be a thrown-games scandal, maybe it will be an epidemic of gambling addiction among young men, maybe it will be both — seems inevitable. Today it’s shocking to see Marlboro ads over the center field fence in clips of 1980s World Series games. It would not surprise me if the parade of gambling ads shown during today’s big events was even more stunning looking back 20 years from now.
Which is why Wembanyama’s answer to the question was so notable. He did not do what most athletes would do. He did not avoid the question or be vague and noncommittal. He did not give some sort of “it’s a complicated issue but people have to make their own decisions” I-don’t-want-any-trouble answer. He made clear where he stood.
“Absolutely not. I will never do that,” Wembanyama said. “Honestly, I think it’s very sad to see some players promote it, in my opinion. Everybody does whatever they want, but without me.”
This is who Wembanyama is. He has always been careful about what his image is used to sell. “I’ve refused plenty, much, much more money than I’ve made for things that were not to my values,” he said. “Now I want to promote things that have a good impact, have a good influence on the world … with who I can share messages and values.”
Wemby’s position, it’s fair to say, is not typical of today’s athletes — or celebrities in general. The idea of sharing values has become almost naively throwback, like some ’90s Gen Xer droning on about never selling out, man. The consensus now is that you’re supposed to get yours while you can.
But Wembanyama’s statement — really, his line in the sand — points to a potential shifting of the cultural winds. Because, as great a player as LeBron remains, he’s nearly 20 years older than Wembanyama. Wemby is the future of the league, the player whose voice will resonate on and off the court for many years. It is remarkable that he is taking a strong stand on such a vital and current public issue — something that makes his league, and many of its players, so much money — simply because he believes it’s bad for the world and bad for his sport.
It’s a viewpoint that, like Wemby, is likely to age well, as the effects of gambling are felt more and more inside and outside of the NBA. Taking a stand, disagreeing with your league and many of your colleagues over a moral issue, has become incredibly rare in sports and entertainment. It’s exciting that Wembanyama clearly wants to change that. It’s yet another reason to be deeply impressed by him. Even if he couldn’t beat the Knicks.
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