The theme of the new NBA season – old and reliable versus new and shiny

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A couple of days before the start of the basketball season, Chris Paul met Victor Wembanyama.

Paul is 38 and headed to the Hall of Fame. He could win a championship this year with Golden State.

Wembanyama is 19 and has never played in an NBA game. It’ll be a miracle if he wins 30 games with the San Antonio Spurs this season.

But the two of them together is a nice visual reminder of the league’s continuity over generations. So they agreed to a postgame photo shoot.

Wembanyama is 7 foot 4. Paul is listed at six feet, though that’s aspirational.

You’d think they’d arrange the picture so as not to make it look like ‘bring your kid to work’ day. But no. Paul was left to dangle. A wide angle shot caught him standing on tippy toes, straining to grab a couple of extra inches. He’s since become a figure of online fun.

This is how the NBA works – one day you’re the centre of the universe; blink, and you’re a human prop in the marketing of the next big thing.

That’s the theme of the season that begins Tuesday night – old and reliable versus new and shiny.

Wembanyama is the newest, shiniest thing in the league since Zion Williamson and his understandably stressed ligaments showed up four years ago.

Wembanyama is a new arrival from France. He’s probably living out of boxes. But thanks to a few highlight reels in heavy rotation, the expectation is that he will immediately be Michael Jordan but a foot taller. The 20-year trend in basketball is bigger and more agile at the same time. Wembanyama operates like a science experiment in that regard, head bobbing above the crowd while he takes huge, court-eating steps toward the basket.

He will disappoint. Not because he won’t be good, but because NBA hype is like no other hype, and no one could measure up to it. At best, Wembanyama will survive this season without being singled out as a potential bust. Williamson couldn’t manage that.

Wembanyama is No. 1 on a short list of names the NBA wants you to get excited about. Scoot Henderson is Wembanyama, but normal sized. Though he already looks like he’s 40, Luka Doncic is still on the list. Anthony Edwards is the sleeper next big thing. He could be a really big thing if he found himself a sticky nickname. Every time I hear ‘Anthony Edwards’ I think, ‘The guy on ER?’

Toronto’s Scottie Barnes figures somewhere on the list. After a desultory sophomore season, he’s gone from ‘can’t miss’ to ‘could conceivably miss.’ But he still has enough charm and upside to feature on the long list.

Barnes’s greatest drawback? He plays in Toronto. The Raptors have been headed nowhere since the pandemic bubble season, but it’s never been this obvious. They have a new head coach (Darko Rajakovic) and a new outlook (‘Let’s learn some basketball!’).

Will they make the playoffs? I should hope not.

There are two types of teams in the NBA – bad ones with young, exciting players; and good ones with older, boring players.

Everyone need not fit into this dynamic, but no one can escape it.

The Raptors are a neither/nor team. They have players, but they are neither good nor exciting. A few of them are old, but not in a helpful way.

Toronto’s taking up space in the middle. Like that chair you shouldn’t have bought that no one ever sits in, but that you can’t bring yourself to get rid of. As currently staffed, the Raptors are surplus to NBA needs.

There’s only two ways they’re solving this problem – get very bad and draft the next Wembanyama or Edwards; or buy an aging superstar and hope he can Kawhi Leonard you to relevance.

A few weeks ago, the Raptors tried to do it the second way with Damian Lillard. He ended up in Milwaukee instead, reducing Toronto’s odds of postseason success from infinitesimal to negative.

The Raptors are now one of these visiting-team sort of teams. You may remain loyal to them, but if you’re shelling out for tickets, it’s to see someone on the visiting team.

Golden State is still a team everyone wants to see, though their starting five fit demographically into the definition of middle age. They aren’t as exciting any more, but they have pedigree.

Both L.A. teams are old as the hills. Defending champion Denver isn’t old, but its players are not young either. Same with Boston. There is no such thing as a great NBA team led by someone under 25.

Modern sport is obsessed with youth and newness for obvious reasons. They want to sell you something. There are only so many teams good enough to sell you on winning. The rest of them have to sell you novelty.

Most of these new arrivals won’t work out. Doncic was the next Jordan, but now he seems buried under 40 feet of crap in Dallas. Ja Morant was the next Jordan until he started waving a pistol around every time someone hits record on their phone. Williamson was the next Jordan until his knees surrendered.

The next big thing seldom works out. The guy who’s been a big thing for a long time that everyone’s gotten a little weary of (Steph Curry stands out in this regard) is a better bet.

But you can’t do anything useful until you have one or the other.

This season is about which veteran winner (Curry, Leonard, LeBron James, Giannis Antetokounmpo, et al) will win, and which newbie (all those listed above) can show he has some hope of becoming a veteran winner.

And then, like in Toronto, there’s everybody else. All they’re doing is burning time between now and whenever they get worried enough to start taking big swings again.