Victor Wembanyama may not reach the peak of his abilities at San Antonio

Even if you follow the NBA only casually like I do, you will have noticed that this season is all about one player. Victor Wembanyama, the French rookie, is supposed to be the most gifted player to join the league since LeBron James twenty years ago. And at least so far, he has not disappointed in his first season with the San Antonio Spurs. But while he may do well at his current team, research by Benjamin Korman and Florian Kunze indicates that he may not reach the peak of his abilities while he plays there.

The research examined the player stats of every member of an NBA team in the 2020-2021 season. This choice of season is not coincidental but driven by the political events that took place then. Remember that in November 2020, Donald Trump lost the election to Joe Biden and refused to accept his defeat, propagating the lie that the election was stolen from him. This culminated in the storming of the Capitol on 6 January 2021 by his most ardent right-wing supporters.

The researchers theorised immigrants who work in an environment where anti-immigrant sentiments are more common face more pressure at the workplace and thus may commit more mistakes at work. And they used NBA players as ‘guinea pigs’ to test that hypothesis and the vote share for Donald Trump as a measure of anti-immigrant sentiment.

Now, before we proceed, I have to say that I have doubts about the validity of this study because the proposed connection between anti-immigrant sentiment and job performance is tenuous at best. I have been an immigrant in the country I lived in for most of my life and while there were regional differences in anti-immigrant sentiment, I think it never had any effect on my performance at work.

However, in the research, the authors claim that immigrant NBA players were negatively affected by the anti-immigrant sentiment in the state they lived in.

Performance errors made by NBA players and anti-immigrant sentiment

Source: Korman and Kunze (2023)

While I think this hypothesis is difficult to believe, there may be an element of truth in it for sports stars who play in an arena full of rabid fans who tend to shout all kinds of things at players during a game. Hence, I am willing to entertain the thought that in elite sports where margins between success and failure are extremely fine, one might be able to identify such an anti-immigrant effect, but for the whole of society, I remain very doubtful.

While correlation is not causation, controlling for all kinds of factors the authors of the research showed that living in a state with a higher vote share for Donald Trump in 2020 increased the number of mistakes a foreign player made during the season but decreased the number of mistakes American players made. And apparently, this effect was visible for both black and white players.

This is bad news for Victor Wembanyama since he is an immigrant playing for a Texas team, a state where Trump won in 2020 by 5.6 points. Hence, Victor will probably be making more mistakes if he stays in San Antonio than if he moves to, say New York or California. But if I may give Victor one piece of advice: don’t do it. You’ll be a great player no matter where you go and the folks in San Antonio deserve to see you play for a couple of years before you move on.