“Victor Wembanyama will immediately take on the importance of a leader,” assures Vincent Collet after the announcement of the expanded list for the Olympics

The coach explained on Thursday his choices for the list of 19 Blues who will play the preparation matches for the Olympic Games.

On the sidelines of the announcement of the expanded selection of 19 players for the preparation of matches at the Olympic Games, coach Vincent Collet returned to his choices, the integration of star Victor Wembanyama after his first year in the NBA, his future association with Rudy Gobert, but also his important choices for the leader position, considered the most fragile in this French team.

On the integration of Victor Wembanyama:

Vincent Collet (France team coach): He is used to having a lot expected of him, and has been for some time. He showed that he had a real ability to overcome this difficulty. We will make sure to make his task easier, to allow him to express his qualities. The difficulty is that Victor is not a player who will join the team, he will immediately take on the importance of a leader. But I don’t have too many fears, because for a leader to emerge, he has to be good and that is the case. But others also have to see it as such, and I believe that is the case too. So it will be much easier.

His teammates know how much he can help us and they will make his job easier for him. Its integration depends on so many parameters, but there is no reason why it should not go well. He will have to readjust a bit, but I have no worries for him.

On the Gobert-Wembanyama association:

There are times when they will play together. Not systematically but they will play together. The preparation will serve to find complicity, a balance: Victor has the capacity to move away, and I see no reason which would prevent us from associating them. On the other hand, I think that this association should allow us to have a very important defensive base. We will try to make the best use of the deterrent capacity that their association provides.

On the team’s defensive identity:

We tried to learn lessons from last year’s failure. We will have to see what happens at the start of preparation, if we are in the right direction. What happened last year and this year gave us ideas to build this group with a strong defensive identity. We thought a lot about complementarity. There are players assured of their selection and it is around them that we wanted to build this team.

The objective will be to find a lot of races, which we had lost a little. You will have to make this possible by making stops, being efficient in rebounding to restart quickly and run. We have a team profile that lends itself to this, especially the young people who have this quality, so we will try to develop it as much as possible. We want to rely on high speed, I think we have it. The arrival of Victor should also make us switch to the interior game.

On the choice of leaders:

The evaluation is not simple because what makes the real difference between men and women is that there are many championships, and it is difficult to evaluate the players according to the Leagues: Betclic, G- League, Euroleague…

What we thought about his situation was a question of size. We determined a certain number of parameters, so we evaluated the players accordingly, and it was also in relation to our opponents: we know that among our opponents at the Olympics, there are big players in this position. So we took that as the first criterion for the leaders. The return of Andrew Albicy can be explained by this with his defensive abilities.

For the three young players (Ntilikina, Hayes and Maledon), Frank played very little, Killian was cut in February and Théo had difficulties being moved several times. But despite everything, they have interesting profiles in relation to international basketball but also for our team identity. We know that they can perform well in this area.