Over at the PosCast, we’ve now raised more than $35,000 for Team Gleason to help in their fight against ALS! Amazing. If you’d like to enter our raffle and, as they say in Wicked, “make good,” you can donate to Team Gleason here.

If you haven’t had a chance, it would be awesome if you would take this little survey about your favorite sports. It shouldn’t take you more than a minute.

Several of you have wondered if your paid subscription is working. While we’re still working out the early kinks, I will try an experiment: Today, I’ve made all the Posterisks visible only to paid subscribers. If you are a paid subscriber and you don’t see them, please try logging in on the website in the top right-hand corner. And if you have any issues, please drop us a line at [email protected].

And, of course, if you’d like to subscribe, we’d love to have you, here’s the upgrade page:

Mavericks Trade Luka? What?

OK, this is kind of funny: I already had a Victor Wembanyama essay ready to go today. I mean, you don’t have to take my word for it: The Wemby piece is below.

What makes this humorous, at least to me, is that we don’t write NBA stuff here very often. For some reason, I felt moved to give you this bonus weekend essay on Wemby. And then the whole league went bananas, and now I actually have to write TWO NBA essays for you.

Have to? Yeah. It would look ridiculous to have something just on Victor Wembanyama* in the moments after this Mavericks to Lakers, Luka Dončić for Anthony Davis neutron bomb trade. It would be like, in the moments after the Kirk Gibson home run, writing only about the Milwaukee Brewers offseason plans.

The stunned reaction to the Luka-AD trade all across the NBA makes me happy — it often feels to me that in today’s social mediathon/24-hour news/nonstop rumor mill, it’s almost impossible to get surprised by sports news. There’s always a leak, right? There’s always a hint, a whisper, a flag. We knew the Dodgers were going to sign Rōki Sasaki months before he apparently knew it. But the Mavs trading Dončić, well, apparently nobody saw that coming — when Shams Charania broke the story, people assumed his account must have been hacked. It’s nice to be surprised in sports.

There are countless others out there who are better suited to try and make sense of this deal — Mavericks GM Nico Harrison preemptively tried to quell the upcoming Dallas rioting by throwing out everybody’s favorite “Defense wins championships” chestnut that has the double benefit of being (1) Boring and (2) Not true. I mean, OK, it’s not-not true, defense does indeed win championships but only in the same way that offense wins championships, in the same way that rebounding wins championships, in the same way that sharing the ball wins championships, in the same way that depth wins championships, in the same way that taking care of the basketball wins championships, in the same way that coaching wins championships, in the same way that team chemistry wins championships, in the same way that stars win championships, in the same way that the bench wins championships, in the same way that …

Everything wins championships. Everything also loses championships.

Luka is 25 years old and one of the three or five best players on Planet Earth. He might be THE best offensive player on Planet Earth. The knocks on him, yes, are that he’s not a great defender and that he is not exactly the most well-conditioned athlete in the world. It is beyond funny to me that in the NBA —with all these Adonis-like, Giannis, Dwight Howard athletic bodies —two of the world’s very best players are Luka and Nikola Jokić, both of whom look like they stopped at multiple food trucks on the way to the arena.

To say that Luka doesn’t play great defense and isn’t always in top condition, while perhaps true, feels a lot like saying that Daniel Day-Lewis can’t sing or that Beyoncé is not a chess grandmaster. You can probably work around that. Luka Dončić is a basketball god. You see it in the numbers: He averaged 34 points, 10 assists and 9 rebounds per game last year. You see it on the court: The eye follows him everywhere. You see it in the results: Dallas shocked just about everybody by going to the NBA Finals last year.

Yes, they did lose to Boston in those Finals, and yes, Boston was the superior defensive team. So, I suppose you could make the argument that with less Luka and more defense they would have had a better chance of beating Celtics. Of course, there’s no chance they would have GOTTEN to the NBA Finals without Luka, which seems a more salient point. In any case, Anthony Davis is a future Hall of Famer who can be an unstoppable scorer and, more to Nico Harrison’s point, plays hella defense when he’s healthy. Then again, Davis is also turning 32 in a couple of months, and he often isn’t healthy.

For an enthusiastic but elementary NBA fan like myself, it’s impossible to see how the Mavericks helped themselves here.

The Lakers, on the other hand, just landed Shohei Ohtani. Lamar Jackson fell from the sky. Connor McDavid was left in a basket on their doorstep. I’m not sure they even know how it happened. Everybody is gaga about the Lakers’ future now — in a star-driven league they just landed Polaris. At the same time, from what I can tell, NBA analysts are wondering how Luka and LeBron will play together this year since they both like to have the basketball and there’s only one of those out there.

Look: They know ten trillion times more about this than I do, and we still haven’t heard LeBron’s reaction to the deal — he was apparently as blindsided by it as everybody else. Maybe he will rebel. Then again, LeBron is 40 years old, he sees the end, and he’s the best basketball player who ever lived … I think he can figure out a way to play with young Mozart.

The Time Machine Player

OK, this is what I had ready to go about Wemby …

Friday night against Milwaukee, San Antonio absurdity Victor Wembanyama had 30 points, including five three-pointers, 14 rebounds, and six blocked shots. He was the second player in NBA history to put together that point cocktail, the other being a familiar name, Victor Wembanyama, who did the 30-5-15-6 thing against the Sixers last April.

Of course, as everybody here knows, you can make statistics sound inordinately impressive when you make them super-specific like that. For instance, only two players in baseball history hit 34 home runs, 34 doubles, and 3 triples, stole 30 bases, scored 100 runs, drove in 100 RBI, and grounded into fewer than five double plays in less than 675 plate appearances. Two players.

The first was Howard Johnson in 1989.

The second was Howard Johnson in 1991.

Wemby — like Hojo or Shohei or Lamar Jackson or Ariana Grande* — is one of those people who blows our minds because he combines skills that we never really see combined.

What struck me specifically about Wemby’s Friday night was the six blocked shots and five three-pointers.

• Since they’ve been keeping records, 394 different NBA players have blocked six more shots in a game.

• Since they’ve been keeping records, 945 different NBA players have hit five three-pointers in a game.

So, individually, those achievements are not that rare.

But put them together — those two absurdly divergent skills — and we’re down to seven players.

The first to do it was Robert Horry in a game against Golden State back in 1996. Horry was an unusual player; there just weren’t many 6-foot-10 guys back then who shot three-pointers.

Most three-point attempts in a season by a player 6-foot-10 or taller (through 1996):

Last season, Michael Porter Jr. shot 554 three-pointers, and four other skyscrapers — including Wemby — shot more threes than Horry did in 1995-96.

But we’re talking about the combination … and for Horry, that game against Golden State was a bit of a fluke. He was not, by nature, a big shot blocker.* In fact, those six blocks represented a career-high for him. Looking back, Golden State built up a huge lead in the third quarter, and the Rockets played a frantic fourth quarter with Horry bombing desperation threes and blocking several shots. In typical NBA fashion, Houston did come all the way back — Daryl Morey told me that the 20-point NBA lead is the worst lead in sports. And in typical NBA fashion, Golden State won in overtime.

The next to do it is a personal favorite player of mine — Raef LaFrentz. I covered Raef when he was back at Kansas — I once got into a furious argument with the Kansas City Star’s managing editor about whether LeFrentz was the most famous sports “Raef” in history. I had written a column confidently saying that he was, and Mark, the managing editor, furiously sent me an inner-office memo stating that decathlete Rafer Johnson was unquestionably more famous than Raef LaFrentz.

“OK,” I said reasonably, “but his name is Rafer. That’s not Raef.”

At which point, Mark went into the archives and found some obscure story with a quote calling Rafer Johnson “Rafe” — he made a copy of this clipping, circled the quote with red ink, and wrote in capital letters: “RAFE!”

At which point I said it was spelled differently.

I didn’t get a raise that year.

Anyway, after he got to the NBA, LaFrentz pulled off the six blocked shots/five three-pointers double twice in January 2002. He was playing for Denver then and in a game against Sacramento, he blocked six shots and made six threes — in all, he scored 30 and grabbed 10 boards, though the story in the next day’s paper was about him getting shut down in the fourth quarter as the Kings won their 10th straight game.

“LaFrentz was drilling everything,” Kings coach Rick Adelman said. “I think we just got him flat-out tired.”

Less than two weeks later, against Miami, LaFrentz did the 6-5 blocked shot/three-pointer combo again. Again, nobody really noticed — Denver lost that game too, and LaFrentz told reporters that he wanted out because the Nuggets weren’t trying to win. He was traded to Dallas less than three weeks later.

But he remained the only player in NBA history to twice have six blocked shots and five three-pointers in a game.

And then came Wemby.

Wemby has done the 6-5 double FOUR TIMES in the last year, and in many ways, Friday was the least impressive because he ONLY made five threes and ONLY blocked six shots. In November, he made six threes and blocked seven shots. In December, he made six threes and blocked EIGHT shots.

Let me put it another way: Wembanyama leads the NBA in blocked shots — he’s blocking four shots per game. Only nine players since the NBA started keeping track have blocked four shots per game in a season:

Add up ALL the three-pointers they made by those players in those seasons — and, yes, it’s true Smith and Kareem did it before the three-point line though I don’t think either of them was interested in shooting long-range gjumped — and you get 23 total three-pointers, with 20 of those from the magical Manute Bowl in 1988-89.

Wembanyama has made 130 threes just this season.

Or put it another way: I don’t think anyone has forgotten — Victor Wembanyama is 7-foot-3. There have been 28 players in NBA history who have been 7-foot-3 or taller. Combined, the other 27 made 322 three-points in their combined 7,849 games. Arvydas Sabonis made about half of those threes.

Victor Wembanyama alone, in just 111 games, has made 258 three-pointers.

I sometimes think that if I was a bajillionaire, I would spend all my money trying to build a time machine. And I would not do that to get a Sports Slmanac and Biff my way to riches. No, I would build a time machine so I could, say, send Blake Snell back to face the 1920s Yankees or send Derrick Henry back to run the ball in the 1950s NFL or send Simone Biles to compete in the 1972 Olympics or send Roger Federer with a modern tennis racket back to play Wimbledon against Bjorn Borg. I would just want to see the people’s reactions to these impossible superheroes just showing up.

But the truth is, I don’t have to go back in time. It’s quite obvious that some future version of me thoughtfully sent Victor Wembanyama back to our time. I can just look in the mirror to see the reaction.