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    Jeremy Gohier: The Canadian phenom following Victor Wembanyama’s path

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    By on News, Rising Stars
    Jeremy Gohier
    Basketball Sphere
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    At just 15 years old, Jeremy Gohier has already become one of the most fascinating long-term prospects in world basketball.

    The FIBA Under-17 World Cup ended in Istanbul on July 5. Four days later, Jeremy Gohier was already in the western suburbs of Paris, working out in the colors of Nanterre 92, the club that raised Victor Wembanyama.

    Gohier stands somewhere between 7-foot-4 and 7-foot-6, depending on who you ask. And he has just made the least Canadian move available to a Canadian prospect: skipping the American prep machine entirely to develop in the French system, under the same agency, and now the same club, that produced the best young player in the world.

    Jeremy Medjana, the Comsport agent who signed Gohier in April, went out of his way in an interview with le Journal de Quebec to reject the comparison before anyone could make it: the profiles are different, he said, even if certain traits rhyme.

    He’s right, and the reasons he’s right are exactly what make Gohier a fascinating evaluation rather than a marketing exercise. Wembanyama at 15 was a wisp, with a wingspan that would eventually stretch toward eight feet. Gohier at 15 is closer to a “bulldozer” by Medjana’s estimate, nearly 40 kilograms heavier than Victor was at the same age. His agents’ first stated priority is not adding to that body but managing it, because the mobility is the asset they refuse to sacrifice.

    So no, this is not the next Wembanyama. Basketball has seen far less of what Gohier actually is: an extremely tall teenager who is also, already, extremely strong.

    The karate school

    Every origin story about a 7-foot-5 basketball player writes itself, except this one. Gohier didn’t start playing because a coach spotted a tall kid in a hallway. He started because a karate school in Laval, the suburb north of Montreal where he grew up, shut down when he was six, and his mother, Genevieve Brosseau, simply wanted him in a sport within driving distance.

    The school next door happened to offer basketball. She has been clear, in Quebec media, that his height had nothing to do with it, there was no plan, just a mother replacing one after-school activity with another. Global News reported that as a kid he shot hoops with her every day.

    The plan arrived later, and from outside. In September 2024, a 13-year-old Gohier, then listed at 7-foot-3 and still in what Americans would call seventh grade, showed up at the MSHTV Camp in the United States and broke the basketball internet’s brain for a week.

    Clips of him dunking without effort, swatting shots and moving through space with a smoothness that had no business at those dimensions spread through Ballislife and Future Prospects D1 to millions of followers. The images that traveled furthest were the absurd ones: a photo beside Hakeem Olajuwon in which the Hall of Famer looks like the shorter man by half a head, because he is; a clothing tailor needing a step ladder, and a leap, to high-five him.

    By the following spring, the attention had turned material. Global News, which described him as a “living, breathing cheat code,” reported in March 2025 that the 14-year-old was fielding interest from the United States, Europe and even Russia, and that his club coach at Nobel Elite in Laval, Daniel Mulumba, said full-ride scholarship offers were already arriving from colleges.

    Mulumba’s evaluation of his own player, given to CTV News that spring, is the line every subsequent scout has echoed: “His greatest asset, besides him being tall, is his work ethic …” The back half of that sentence credits how hard he competes. The same CTV reporting supplied the details that make the profile physical rather than mythical: 242 pounds at 14, size-20 feet, his father, Félix, noting that keeping him fueled requires at least four meals a day.

    Gohier has been candid, unusually so for his age, about what the sudden visibility costs. In a September 2025 interview with the Quebec outlet Au Coeur du Quebec, he described the constant recognition as something that sounds thrilling until it happens every single day, and admitted he carries far more pressure than he lets show, with invitations arriving from every major program in the United States you could name.

    His mother sees the weight of it from the outside: when Jeremy walks into a gym, she has said, people expect something, and he knows it, so he loads the expectation onto his own shoulders. Her other contribution to that interview is the detail worth keeping: what makes her proudest, she said, is that he never learned to shrink. Plenty of very tall teenagers fold inward. Her son sees only the tops of heads and walks upright anyway, and she credits basketball with teaching him to embrace the thing that makes him different.

    What the record actually says

    Start where a front office would start: nobody agrees on how tall he is. Prep Network, cataloguing the chaos last August, noted that its own listing had him at 7-foot-3, FIBA at 7-foot-6, and his social media profiles at 7-foot-4. FIBA’s official registration at both of his international tournaments reads 229 centimeters, 7-foot-6; his new club lists him at 2.26, a three-centimeter gap BasketUSA reads, plausibly, as shoes. Gohier himself, asked directly by veteran international scribe David Hein in Istanbul this month, was specific: 7-foot-5 on the dot, in shoes, not a centimeter more, with a wingspan he puts at 7-foot-6. He also says he’s done growing, something he told Hein he checked last year, and the family has been down this road before.

    His parents, unnerved by the early growth spurts, took him to doctors for tests; per his father in CTV’s reporting, everything came back clear, so they settled on genetics as the answer. What has not stopped changing is everything else. Between last summer and this one, Gohier says, he added 40 pounds of muscle, and his wingspan lengthened. Take all of it as self-reported until an NBA combine says otherwise, but note two things.

    First, if the growth really has stopped, he diverges from fellow Quebecer Olivier Rioux’s trajectory and teams can evaluate a finished frame rather than a moving target. Second: a 7-foot-6 wingspan on a 7-foot-5 body would be a nearly neutral ratio, well short of the reach advantages most NBA giants carry. Rioux, at 7-foot-9, has a reported eight-foot span.

    The necessary caveat is that a self-measured span which, by Gohier’s own account, grew within the past year is the softest number in this file. If it holds anyway, his game will have to be built on mass, mobility and hands rather than pterodactyl reach — a different archetype, and the single most important measurement a professional staff will want to verify.

    Now the games, and here the file turns uncomfortable, because the box scores and the highlight reels describe two different players. Across two major FIBA tournaments, the U16 AmeriCup in Juarez, Mexico last June and the U17 World Cup in Istanbul this summer, Gohier has averaged 2.5 and 2.4 points per game. Canada took silver at the AmeriCup, falling to the United States in the final, and entered Istanbul among the medal favorites before finishing sixth at 4-3, losing the opener to Lithuania, the quarterfinal to an unbeaten Australia, and the fifth-place game to France.

    In both events, Gohier was the tallest player in the field and among the very youngest, born November 5, 2010, he was playing up nearly two years against the top of the 2009 birth-year cohort, and at the AmeriCup he was simultaneously the youngest and tallest player on Canada’s roster.

    Read closely, the AmeriCup log is more interesting than its topline. In 10.6 minutes a game he pulled 4.3 rebounds, a scoring average that ranked 76th among all players at the event, per FIBA’s own leaderboard, attached to a rebounding average that ranked 32nd, which is what an elite per-minute rebounder buried on the bench looks like. Nine of his 26 boards came on the offensive glass.

    By FIBA’s cumulative box score, Canada outscored opponents by 40 points in his 64 minutes. He shot 46.7 percent from the floor and committed five fouls all tournament, a low number for a 14-year-old giant, though the modest block total (three) suggests the flip side: a defender not yet hunting events. And in six games he did not attempt a single three. Hold that against the viral step-back jumpers that made him famous. The warts are equally legible: 1-of-4 from the free-throw line, and six turnovers against one assist, including a four-turnover quarterfinal against Mexico in 13 minutes that reads like a young big meeting hard double-teams for the first time.

    Istanbul was more of the same, with one loud exception. Through the group phase he managed 2.0 points on 27.3 percent shooting in 11.7 minutes; the knockout rounds brought 12 total minutes across two games. Then came the 5th-8th classification game against Puerto Rico, an 89-79 Canada win, the only extended run of his international career to date: 21 minutes, 8 points on 4-of-5 shooting, 7 rebounds, 3 assists, 2 blocks and a steal.

    One game, in a consolation bracket, against a Puerto Rico side BeBasket noted was thin up front. Every caveat applies. But it is also the only data point showing what the per-minute production looks like when the minutes arrive, and it filled every column. The tournament closed quieter still: in the fifth-place game against France, 10 minutes, three rebounds, an assist, two steals and no points.

    There is a structural explanation for the gap between the clips and the numbers, and Gohier named it himself in Istanbul. With Nobel Elite he plays on the wing, power forward, even small forward, while Canada uses him as a pure center: screens, dives, both backboards, a role he himself compares to Shaquille O’Neal’s.

    His ambition points the other way entirely. “Oh, I want to be the best small forward, bro,” he told Hein, and while no serious evaluator projects a small forward at his size and mass, the sentence tells you where his self-image and skill work live: face-up, on the move, with the ball. Independent eyes support pieces of both identities. NBA Draft Room’s early card praises his mobility, his hands and his effort level while stressing how far the development road runs. Prep Hoops evaluator Spencer Pulliam called him a “commanding presence” and built his assessment around exactly what the FIBA logs confirm — the tracking of misses, the positioning, the second-chance points on the offensive glass.

    Wembanyama machinery

    The decisions of April through July 2026 are the real story of his year, more than anything that happened on a court. Signing with Comsport put Gohier’s career in the hands of Bouna Ndiaye and Medjana, the agents who found Wembanyama as a child and managed every step of his construction. Medjana’s public framing has been careful and, from a scouting standpoint, revealing: enormous potential, similarities to Victor in mobility, but a deliberate refusal to equate the profiles, and an immediate flag on the one risk specific to this body. The weight must be watched. A player this heavy who loses his movement loses everything, and the stated plan is the same three-track program they built for Wembanyama: physical, technical, mental.

    Then came Nanterre, and sentiment had little to do with it. A teenage Wembanyama played Adidas Next Gen EuroLeague basketball there in 2019-20, and the club’s youth structure gives Gohier something no North American path could this early: professional-adjacent daily training with a defined runway. Per Hein and BeBasket, the 2026-27 plan runs mainly through Nanterre’s under-18s, with appearances for the under-21 Espoirs possible, alongside prospects like France’s Mathias Fabien and Montenegro’s Marko Bardic, and with the Next Gen EuroLeague a live possibility, whether through a Nanterre entry or a select-team invitation.

    BeBasket adds that the club has revived the specialized program for outsized frames it once ran for Wembanyama, targeting mobility, coordination and the use of his wingspan, and that nobody in Nanterre expects quick returns. For a player whose international career consists almost entirely of 10-minute cameos, the value of the move is simple: reps, against men and near-men, in a system that has done this exact job before.

    Gohier, for his part, has turned the Wembanyama relationship into fuel of a stranger, more personal kind. He told Hein he first registered Victor watching the 2021 U19 World Cup, and that for the past year he has run a private, one-sided competition against him, studying his games, cataloguing what he does better and worse than the Spurs star.

    His current scorecard is disarmingly honest: right now, he concedes, Wembanyama does everything better. Everything except one thing. Gohier believes he is the stronger, more physical of the two, and on the evidence of the two bodies at the same age, he is almost certainly correct.

    Giants, north of the border

    Zoom out and Gohier is the third act of a pattern nobody can quite explain: Quebec, and Canada broadly, keeps producing enormous basketball players. Zach Edey, at a listed 7-foot-4, went ninth overall to Memphis in 2024, the league’s tallest player until Wembanyama’s own revised 7-foot-5 listing overtook him.. Rioux, 7-foot-9 and once the Guinness-certified tallest teenager on earth, redshirted at Florida and, per BasketUSA, moves to UC Irvine for 2026-27 in search of a bigger role. FIBA has already written Gohier into the lineage.

    But the honest version of this section includes the actuarial table. The list of players 7-foot-5 and taller who sustained long, high-impact NBA careers is short. Yao Ming reached the Hall of Fame and still could not get his lower body to cooperate past 30; most of the rest, Muresan, Bradley, Bol, and the specialists who followed, found roles rather than stardom, and fought their own frames the whole way. This is the base rate any professional evaluation of Gohier begins from, and it is why the Comsport program obsesses over load, weight and movement quality before anything else.

    The honest projection

    Strip away the virality and the evaluation reads like this. In the asset column: a finished-or-nearly-finished frame of historic size that already carries functional strength, which almost no one at this height has ever had at 15; verified per-minute rebounding against older elite competition; soft hands and real mobility attested by multiple independent evaluators; a foul rate that suggests unusual body control; and a temperament, competitive, self-critical, publicly composed under absurd attention, that every adult in his orbit, from his Laval club coach to his French agency, vouches for without being asked.

    The liability column answers back. Essentially no scoring production yet at the international level; a shooting stroke that so far exists on camera but not in FIBA box scores, where he has yet to attempt a three; free-throw and turnover numbers that flag developing touch and decision speed; a possibly neutral wingspan that would cap the cheap rim-protection value most giants bank on; a body type whose league history demands humility about durability. And one entry that matters more than the rest: the mobility itself is contested.

    The French press watched the same World Cup as everyone else and came away colder. BeBasket described a player still massive and short on mobility who suffered defensively in transition and on changes of speed and direction, while BasketUSA judged him raw for now, his still-developing mobility and inexperience keeping him from shaping games for long stretches, where Wembanyama, they pointed out, was already an outlier mover at the same age. Set that against NBA Draft Room, Pulliam, his agents and the player himself, and you have a live disagreement among evaluators over the single trait the entire bet rests on.

    None of that is contradictory. That is what a November 2010 birthdate at the outer edge of human size is supposed to look like, which is also why the honest evaluator’s answer to “what is he?” remains: too early, and open. The range of outcomes runs from franchise-altering to cautionary, and the width of that range is the point.

    What can be judged now is the process, and the process is hard to fault so far. He has played up in age at every opportunity. His family has resisted the American showcase circuit’s sugar high in favor of a development system with a proven record at this exact problem. The people paid to be skeptical agents who could have sold the Wembanyama comparison for millions in easy attention are instead publicly talking down the hype and up the workload.

    Under the current collective bargaining agreement, the earliest door is 2029: international players become draft-eligible the calendar year they turn 19, and Gohier turns 19 that November. The American path he left behind, tied by recruiting services to the high school class of 2030, would have pushed the timeline further out. Assuming the rules hold, the runway runs three to four seasons, and the first checkpoints are concrete: real minutes in France’s youth competitions, a jumper that migrates from Instagram to a stat sheet, and a body that stays mobile as it matures.

    In Istanbul this month, Gohier was asked what would surprise people about his game. His answer, in essence: that nobody expects a man his size to move the way he does. The box scores don’t show that player yet. The people who built Victor Wembanyama just bet the next several years that they will.

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