After the first minutes of this match counting for the 21st day of Betclic Élite, we thought that the evening was going to be very rotten for the Mets 92 and their prodigy Victor Wembanyama. After 10 minutes of play, Vincent Collet’s players were trailing by 15 points (17-32). They counted up to 21 behind in an early game where they were next to their socks. The Dijonnais, on the other hand, delivered perfect basketball on both sides of the field. But it couldn’t last, neither on one side nor on the other.
Forty-eight hours into a Champions League game against Tel Aviv, Dijon couldn’t play as well for 40 minutes except to level up with a powerhouse like Monaco. It couldn’t, especially without David Holston, the one who can challenge “Wemby” for the title of MVP of the season. Opposite, the Mets couldn’t keep playing so badly either. Even without Tremont Waters, the league’s best player in January, even without Hugo Besson, the Mets could only wake up. Wembanyama could not continue to be so discreet.
So Dijon started to run out of steam, Boulogne-Levallois woke up and Victor Wembanyama came out of his box. Discreetly at first: a small counter here, a rebound there, a dunk elsewhere. And like Boulogne-Levallois, it’s not that Wembanyama, Steeve Ho You Fat, Lahaou Konaté and the youngster of the band Bilal Coulibaly allowed the Mets to gradually catch up. At the break, Dijon was still ahead 42-51 but it was starting to feel scorched for the visitors: “Between what I saw at the start of the match and what I saw at the end, analyzed Vincent Collet at his players in the locker room on images captured by BeINSport, I did not see the same thing. I saw the same players but I didn’t see the same team. »
29 points for Wembanyama
Marcel-Cerdans’ public, always copiously garnished in the presence of “Wemby”, either. The second half was the reverse copy of the first with the Dijonnais this time overwhelmed and the Ile-de-France residents uninhibited. The probable future number 1 of the NBA Draft was able to pull out his secret boots: three-point shots, dunks, counters. In short, all his panoply to finish the game with 29 points in the bag, nine rebounds, an evaluation of 30 and a victory for the Mets (93-86): “We realize that we have to start the matches because our start got us in trouble, says Bilal Coulibaly at the microphone of BeINsport. For my part, I have been waiting to play since the beginning of the season and now I am revealing myself. Vincent Collet did not fail to congratulate him.
This victory of the Mets, who remained on two defeats, falls could not be better. Because next week will be complicated. On Wednesday, Wembanyama and his family will challenge the best in the French Championship: the Roca Team of Monaco in the Coupe de France. Two days later in Saint-Chamond, they will challenge the other French team involved in the Euroleague in the quarter-finals of the Leaders Cup: Asvel.