When Victor met Holger
When Victor met Holger
After working with Victor Wembanyama during the summer of 2021, Dirk Nowitzki's longtime shot doctor Holger Geschwindner is convinced we have another basketball revolutionary in our midst
The first question Victor Wembanyama had for Dirk Nowitzki's lifelong shooting sensei had nothing to do with basketball.
"How much does it cost?" Wembanyama asked Holger Geschwindner, figuring there would surely be some sort of booking fee to schedule a visit to study Dirk-ian techniques right in the laboratory where they originated.
"Nothing," Geschwindner said. "It never costs any penny for anybody."
So began a weeklong roundball science camp for the most ballyhooed hoops prospect on the planet in a no-frills gym in Bamberg, Germany, that just thinking about now made Wembanyama's "eyes light up," as my pal Pascal Giberné recently wrote for SLAM when the subject was broached.
The basketball world excitedly inhaled every dribble of Wembanyama's two-game residence in Las Vegas that attracted some 200 NBA executives and scouts and, by the time it was over, established him as one of the most certain locks to go No. 1 overall in the draft in league history. It wasn't merely the noisy 73 points, 15 rebounds, nine blocked shots and nine 3-pointers that Wembanyama amassed in the two games. It was the fluidity and versatility and easy shooting range he uncorked at 7-foot-3, or 7-4 ... or whatever Wembanyama's tall-tale height actually is.
Yet given my personal history, having covered Nowitzki and Geschwindner essentially since the first steps they took together on Dallas soil in March 1998 in preparation for a famed Nike Hoop Summit game in San Antonio, I naturally find myself just as intrigued by the trip Wembanyama took the previous summer. In late July 2021, it was just the then-17-year-old French teen and two young German players — twins Brandon and Nicholas Tischler — on the floor together, dutifully following Geschwindner's unorthodox instructions in what the lifelong devotee to the laws of physics has jokingly referred to for years as "The Institute of Applied Nonsense."
Very long strides. Deep knee bends and squats. Pivot steps with extreme precision. Drill after drill after drill to achieve …
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