Everyone Loves To Watch Zion Williamson Play. Maybe As Much As He Loves Playing. Expectations vs. Reality
Everyone Loves To Watch Zion Williamson Play. Maybe As Much As He Loves Playing. Expectations vs. Reality
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| Zion Williamson is expected to stay only one season at Duke before entering the N.B.A. draft. He is already earning comparisons to Hall of Fame players.
DURHAM, N.C. — It is difficult to reconcile the awe that comes out of the mouths of adults about Zion Williamson when you’re watching the player slumped in a chair after a 33-point blowout victory, answering goofy questions with a goofy smile.
“Did you feel like a tight end on that breakaway?” “Is it true you were offered scholarships to play football?” “Do you feel pressure to put on a show when you get the ball?” Williamson, Duke’s star freshman and (many expect) a No. 1 N.B.A. draft pick by June, had just turned in the kind of performance against Yale that college hoops aficionados have come to expect from him: 20 points, 8 rebounds, 4 assists and the requisite head-above-the-rim tomahawk dunk that has made him a staple of television highlight reels and internet video compilations. After absorbing each question, Williamson looked at his teammate Mike Buckmire, who pretended he was playing the role of Williamson’s consigliere. Buckmire nodded for him to answer. No, Williamson said, he did not feel like a tight end. Yes, he had received offers to play football. “They are not exaggerating — I did pick up a couple of football scholarships,” he said. As for his rim-rattling performance art? “If it’s there, I’m going to do it, because I like to put on a show,” he said with yet another big smile. In fact, everything about Williamson is big. At 6 feet 7 inches and 285 pounds, he is not only Paul Bunyan-esque for the college ranks but also, the website FiveThirtyEight noted, heavier than all but one active N.B.A. player. Williamson, however, is hardly earthbound. His 45-inch vertical leap is the highest since Duke started measuring its players, providing the foundation for his explosive moves to the basket — and the reason at least one reporter spoke with a physicist to try to calculate the damage a force like Williamson can cause to those who get in his way. 
While N.B.A. teams long ago took note of Williamson’s skill set — ESPN published an N.B.A. draft preview of him before he had thrown down his first dunk for Duke — it is online where his legend was made and where it continues to grow.
YouTube channels like BallIsLife first started spreading the gospel of Zion when he was a high school star in Spartanburg, S.C., uploading his raw clips and declaring him the “Best Mixtape Player of Our Generation.”
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Nor is it surprising that just 10 games into his collegiate career he is being compared to onetime basketball man-children and subsequent N.B.A. All-Stars like Shawn Kemp and Charles Barkley.
Barkley, a Hall of Famer, was known as the Round Mound of Rebound at Auburn, where his playing weight was about the same as Williamson’s now. But Barkley insisted the similarities ended there. Williamson, he said, is “way more explosive.”
“My weight was fat,” Barkley told the radio host Dan Patrick recently. “I don’t think he’s got fat weight on him.”
Jay Bilas, the ESPN commentator and former Duke forward, does not dare compare Williamson to LeBron James, but he said that he has not been as bowled over by a natural talent since he first saw James 16 years ago, when he was part of the broadcast team for James’s first nationally televised game.
“There has never been anyone like Zion at any level,” Bilas said. “There has never been anyone of his size who can move like him.”
Duke Coach Mike Krzyzewski, too, said Williamson is like no player he has come across in a 44-year career filled with top picks, national championships and Olympic gold medals.
“He is just a unique athlete, and I think part of that is that he was a point guard up until eighth grade,” Krzyzewski said. “He has the ability to handle the ball and to drive without charging, and his second jump — it’s extraordinary how quickly he gets up and gets his miss on any kind of drive.”
Williamson absorbed the intricacies of backcourt play from his stepfather, Lee Anderson, who played at Clemson, before a growth spurt remade his game and his future in it. In the summer between eighth and ninth grade, Williamson grew from 5-foot-9 to 6-foot-3. He continued to fill out through high school.
In the Blue Devils’ season-opening game against Kentucky, he displayed his varied skill set over a 27-second stretch in which he made a 3-pointer, slashed to the basket for a thunderous dunk, blocked a shot and then, on the run, threaded a bounce pass through traffic to his teammate R.J. Barrett, another freshman and probably his biggest challenger for the top spot in next year’s N.B.A. draft.
Among Williamson’s 20 points against Yale was a balletic layup on which he appeared to float through a thicket of Elis before softly dropping the ball through the basket, but also yet another thunderous dunk. In between, he threw at least one nifty pass to Barrett, who poured in 30 points.
“Both are phenomenal,” Bilas said. “But Zion will sell more tickets.”
One of the intangibles that Krzyzewski particularly enjoys is Williamson’s joyfulness. It is on display in pregame warm-ups, when the big man with a guard’s mentality alternates high-wattage smiles with acrobatic dunks and all manner of fist bumps and hand slaps with his teammates.
The joy was palpable in the waning moments of the Yale blowout here, when Williamson — his afternoon complete — remained on his feet in front of the Duke bench, offering full-throated support to the extras taking a rare turn in the Cameron Indoor Stadium spotlight.
The joy was there as the locker room was closing later, too, after Williamson decided to release Buckmire, a walk-on and pre-med student, from his consigliere duties. Williamson swallowed Buckmire into his arms, and for a moment, the 6-2, 170-pound guard disappeared.
“You are good at this,” Williamson said amid muffled laughter.
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