Marine Johannès - The Wizard Was Always There. You Just Weren't Watching
Dynamic Shooters explores the players whose shooting creates pressure, changes defenses, and reshapes the game around them.
Before the one-legged threes became WNBA highlights, before the no-look passes traveled across social media, and before an American audience learned to call Marine Johannès “The Wizard,” there was a girl in Normandy learning to see basketball a little differently.
She was eight when she began playing in Pont-l'Évêque, not far from Lisieux, where she was born. By 12, she had been noticed by USO Mondeville and entered one of France's respected development systems. A few years later, before most players her age would have even begun thinking seriously about college basketball, Johannès was already stepping onto the floor in France's top professional league. Her first LFB appearance came during the 2011–12 season, just before her 17th birthday.
The stages would eventually become much bigger, but the game never became much more conventional. On August 9, 2026, Johannès stood inside Barclays Center and reminded everyone why.
Against Las Vegas, she scored a career-high 27 points and made seven three-pointers in New York's 111–71 win. Some came from the places shooters are supposed to occupy. Others looked unmistakably like Marine Johannès: quick, instinctive, and taken with the kind of balance that seems questionable until the ball drops cleanly through the net.
It would be easy to look at a performance like that and call it a breakout. Doing so would require ignoring almost everything that came before it.
Normandy Built the Player First
Johannès' basketball story did not begin with American attention. It began in Normandy, where she started playing at Pont-l'Évêque before joining Mondeville's system at 12 and gradually working her way toward the senior team.
Her earliest professional minutes were almost comically brief. In her first LFB appearance on January 7, 2012, she played seven seconds. Seven seconds aren't enough to establish a professional career, but they are enough to begin one.
By the time Johannès developed into a regular contributor, the creativity that would eventually make her internationally recognizable was already becoming part of her identity. She could shoot, but she did not always shoot the way basketball traditionally taught players to. She could pass, but the obvious passing window was not necessarily the one she chose. There was a freedom to her game that made ordinary possessions feel as if something unexpected might happen.
Her breakthrough arrived during the 2015–16 season, when she averaged 14.2 points and 4.4 assists for Mondeville. The performance earned her a move to Bourges, one of France's most accomplished clubs, and opened another level of European basketball to her.
Johannès wasn't suddenly becoming the player people would later discover in New York.
She was getting a larger stage on which to show who she already was.
Europe Was Already Watching
Before Johannès ever became a Liberty fan favorite, she had built a résumé that would have made her difficult to overlook anywhere else.
At Bourges, she won three consecutive French Cups from 2017 through 2019 and a French league championship in 2018. Her game also translated to EuroLeague competition, where the same creativity that would eventually produce viral WNBA clips was already attracting attention.
In 2019, EuroLeague Women fans voted her both Best Guard and Most Entertaining Player of the regular season. The second award may have described Johannès better than any statistic could. She wasn't simply productive. People wanted to see what she would try next.
Then came Lyon.
Johannès joined ASVEL in 2019, entering an organization owned by Tony Parker and spending the next several seasons adding to a career that American basketball audiences were only seeing in pieces. The defining European moment arrived in 2023.
ASVEL reached the EuroCup Women Finals against Galatasaray. Johannès scored 25 points in the opening leg and another 20 in the second, averaging 22.5 points across the two games as ASVEL won the first European title in club history. She was named Finals MVP.
For anyone who had been paying attention in Europe, none of this looked particularly surprising. That is part of what makes Johannès' career so interesting. The WNBA did not introduce a developing player to the world. It introduced another audience to a player who had already spent years becoming herself.
American basketball has often encountered her in fragments: a pass, a three-pointer, a playoff performance, a clip that makes its way around social media. Europe had already seen the full résumé being built.
America Got the Highlights Before It Got the Context
Johannès went undrafted in the 2017 WNBA Draft.
Two years later, she arrived in New York.
Her WNBA career has never followed the clean progression typically associated with a player becoming established in the league. International obligations, overlapping basketball calendars and the pandemic repeatedly complicated when she could be available. Her WNBA résumé therefore looks smaller on paper than the professional career surrounding it actually is. Looking only at WNBA games played can make Johannès seem like a player whose career developed in starts and stops. The reality is almost the opposite. While she wasn't in New York, she was often still playing high-level basketball somewhere else.
Still, certain moments made her impossible to miss.
One came during the 2022 playoffs against Chicago.
Johannès received the ball and drew three defenders toward her. Natasha Howard slipped toward the basket. Instead of turning her body and delivering the pass conventionally, Johannès flipped the ball behind her back and over her head without looking.
Howard caught it for the layup, and for a few seconds, one possession explained almost everything about Johannès: the vision, the audacity, and the willingness to see a passing angle most players would never attempt, much less execute in a playoff game.
A year later, the WNBA Finals provided another glimpse.
New York faced Las Vegas in Game 1, and Johannès came off the bench to score 14 points in the first half on 5-of-6 shooting, including four threes. Some were difficult. Some were off-balance. Some came from one leg. All of them forced Las Vegas to account for a player capable of turning shots most defenses are taught to live with into shots they suddenly could not afford to concede.
Afterward, Becky Hammon acknowledged the difficulty of the shots Johannès had made.
That has always been the problem with guarding her.
The scouting report can tell you where she likes to shoot. It cannot always tell you what a shot is going to look like when she gets there.
When Two Basketball Calendars Collided
Johannès' career also reveals something about international players that WNBA conversations do not always capture.
Sometimes representing two basketball worlds means being forced to choose between them.
In 2023, Johannès became caught in a public dispute involving the French national team and her return to New York. She wanted to travel to the United States to handle matters connected to her Liberty season before rejoining France ahead of EuroBasket. The national-team staff would not accommodate the interruption, leaving one of France's most recognizable players off the EuroBasket roster. Johannès later publicly disputed the idea that the decision had been hers.
The disagreement became bigger than one roster decision.
It exposed the complicated reality international WNBA players routinely navigate. National-team camps, domestic leagues, European competitions and WNBA seasons do not always fit neatly together. Loyalty to one can be interpreted as a lack of commitment to another, even when the athlete is simply trying to honor multiple professional responsibilities.
Johannès eventually found her way back.
And Paris was waiting.
One Point From Gold
By the 2024 Olympics, Johannès had already represented France at Rio and Tokyo. Rio ended with France in fourth. Tokyo brought bronze.
Paris offered something different: home. France reached the gold-medal game against the United States, turning the Olympic final into a tense, physical fight that lasted until the final possession. The Americans escaped with a 67–66 victory, leaving France one point short of one of the biggest wins in women's basketball history.
Johannès left Paris with silver. Three Olympic appearances had now produced a bronze medal, a silver medal, and another fourth-place finish.
For American fans who primarily knew Johannès as the Liberty guard capable of producing an impossible highlight, her international résumé offered a much different sense of scale. She wasn't simply an entertaining WNBA player who also represented France. She was a three-time Olympian with more than a decade of elite basketball behind her.
And that chapter is still being written. Johannès has been named to France's extended group for the 2026 FIBA Women's Basketball World Cup and is expected to join Les Bleues in Berlin after completing her WNBA commitments. Two years after helping France come within a single point of Olympic gold on home soil, another opportunity to represent her country on one of basketball's biggest stages is waiting.
The Wizard Came Back
Johannès did not play in the WNBA during the 2024 season as she prioritized France and the Paris Olympics.
When she returned to New York, there was still something familiar about the game.
The strange angles remained. So did the one-legged threes, the passes delivered from places defenses weren't prepared to defend, and the willingness to attempt shots that can make a coach nervous until they remember exactly who is taking them.
But 2026 has offered something else: evidence that the creativity can coexist with sustained production.
Early in the season, Johannès opened with consecutive games featuring at least five made threes, placing herself in rare WNBA territory. Her season has included some of the strongest offensive stretches of her WNBA career, even as an ankle injury interrupted that rhythm during the summer.
Then she returned, and on August 9, seven threes fell against Las Vegas as Johannès finished with 27 points, a new WNBA career high.
At 31, Johannès isn't treating this stage of her career like an ending, either. In June, she agreed to a multiyear deal with Unrivaled, adding another basketball environment built around space, creativity and individual skill to a career that has rarely stayed inside conventional boundaries.
The Wizard is still experimenting.
There Is No Correct Way to Guard This
Dynamic shooting is not simply about making a lot of threes.
It is about changing the geometry of a possession.
Johannès does that differently from most shooters.
There is the one-legged three, a shot that looks closer to a floater until you realize where she released it. There are pull-ups taken while her momentum appears to be carrying her somewhere else. There are shots launched before her feet have settled into the kind of base most players spend years being taught to find.
From a traditional shooting perspective, some of it looks wrong.
That is precisely what makes it difficult to defend.
Defenders are trained to recognize cues. A player's feet set, her shoulders square, and she enters the shooting pocket. Those signals tell the defender what is coming next.
Johannès can remove some of them. The ball can leave her hands before the defense has fully recognized that the shooting motion has begun.
And then there is the passing.
That part matters because a defender cannot simply crowd her shooting space and assume the problem has been solved. Johannès sees openings around aggressive coverage. Commit too much attention to the shot and she can turn the possession into a passing opportunity. Give her room to prevent the drive or the pass and the three becomes available again. That is what makes defending Johannès different from simply chasing a movement shooter. The same creativity that creates unusual shot windows also allows her to recognize what the defense exposed while trying to close them.
That is where the nickname begins to make sense. “The Wizard” isn't really about trick shots. It's about uncertainty: the feeling that the defense may have solved one problem only for Johannès to reveal another.
You Just Had to Know Where to Look
The nickname eventually found her. The résumé had been building all along.
It was there in Pont-l'Évêque, where an eight-year-old first started playing. It followed her to Mondeville at 12 and onto a professional floor before her 17th birthday. It grew through Bourges and Lyon, through European championships, Olympic runs, and a career that repeatedly moved between basketball worlds.
America got the viral pass and the one-legged threes. France and Europe had already watched her build a career around refusing to play basketball exactly the way everyone expected.
So when seven threes fell and 27 points went beside her name on August 9, Johannès did not suddenly become The Wizard. She didn't suddenly discover the audacity to take those shots or the imagination to see those passes.
That player had been there for years.
The gym just got bigger.
And finally, more people were watching.
Merci, Marine, pour toutes ces années de magie. Votre créativité, votre audace et votre façon unique de jouer rendent le basket encore plus beau. Vous êtes une joueuse exceptionnelle, et c'est un véritable plaisir de vous regarder jouer. Continuez à nous faire rêver. La magie était là depuis le début. Il suffisait de savoir où regarder. 💙🤍❤️
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