Regardless of who wins the NBA Finals, it’s been a very good year for Victor Wembanyama — and I say this as a lifelong New Yorker who grew up idolizing Latrell Sprewell. The 22-year-old French basketball player has become a national star thanks to his towering frame (7 ft 4, 235 pounds) and deadly skills at the hoop, and was unanimously named the 2026 Western Conference Finals MVP after carrying the San Antonio Spurs to the championship against the ascendant Knicks. But none of that can make up for the fact that “Wemby” has terrible opinions about Star Wars.

In a recently resurfaced 2023 interview for the basketball culture podcast The Old Man and The Three, a slightly younger Wembanyama was asked to name his favorite Star Wars movie and responded as follows:

“When I say I like Star Wars, I don’t count the last three movies. My favorite is Revenge of the Sith, my second favorite would have to be Attack of the Clones, and then I’d say The Empire Strikes Back.”

Let’s dig into this.

To start, Revenge of the Sith isn’t that shocking or outrageous #1 pick. At 22, Wemby is firmly a part of Gen Z, which means he grew up on the prequels (he’s probably a Clone Wars fan, too), and Episode III is inarguably the best entry in that trilogy.

However, picking Attack of the Clones as his number two best-ever Star Wars movie is downright ludicrous. It’s undeniably the worst of the batch thanks to a mix of terrible CGI, awkward acting, and that unbearable series of scenes where Anakin Skywalker and Padmé Amidala talk about sand and then somehow fall in love. Aside from the coliseum scene, there’s nothing redeeming about Attack of the Clones. Polygon calls on Wembanyama to explain himself ASAP before we can allow the Finals to continue. (Then again, Wemby has the stature of a Kaminoan, so maybe he feels seen.)

Seemingly sensing that he’s made a grave mistake, Wembanyama takes a beat before tacking on the always safe choice of The Empire Strikes Back to the end of his list. There’s no arguing that it’s a great movie, but putting Empire behind Attack of the Clones is downright sacrilegious. Please recall the best someone could do in cutting together a trailer out of Episode II moments.

All that said, Wembanyama’s worst Star Wars opinion has nothing to do with the prequels or the original trilogy. Instead, it’s his total dismissal of the “last three movies,” aka the sequel trilogy made up of The Force Awakens, The Last Jedi, and The Rise of Skywalker. While there’s no denying that those movies are uneven — and Rise of Skywalker was a downright disaster that set the entire franchise back by nearly a decade — I still take issue with the idea that these movies simply “don’t count.”

Not only is there plenty to love about both The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi, but claiming they aren’t legitimate feeds into a bizarre push from certain dark corners of the fandom to de-canonize the sequel trilogy. There’s a small but vocal fanbase that wishes Star Wars never expanded to include things like Black and female leads, and is capitalizing on the current uneasy state of the franchise to push it back in the “right” direction.

Whether inadvertently or not (probably inadvertently, or absorbed from being a 22-year-old online in the 2020s), Wemby’s take feeds into that effort. All I can hope is that, in the two years since this interview, his thinking on the sequel trilogy and Star Wars in general, has evolved.

Either way: Go Knicks.