Photo from aperturelfp via Flickr
Somewhere during last season, I had enough. The pain became unbearable, the sleepless nights no longer a fair price to pay for so little reward. I decided to give up on Terrence Williams.
It was a decision that was brewing in my mind for quite a while, and yet one with which I was never truly at peace. Williams theoretically possessed everything anybody should enjoy watching in a player. A combination of size and passing ability that is usually reserved either for Hall of Famers or epic flameouts, nothing in between. Rare athleticism overflowing from every pore. Perhaps even more impressively, this was not the Saer Sene type of athleticism, the one flanked by a seeming inability to use it. Williams always seemed comfortable using his considerable gifts to get anywhere he wants on the court in a graceful manner. Of course, getting there while maintaining possession of the basketball was a far rarer occasion, but that should come with time, said my giddy brain, rendered nearly useless by the never ending stream of could-be.
Of course, it took less than two NBA calendars for Terrence to push the boundaries of said projected amount of time from a few seasons to almost infinite proportions. Every mind-blowing stat line from those last few weeks of that awkward rookie season on a 70 loss team, every pass, every drive, every dunk contest campaign – everything was lost in a whirlwind of low basketball IQ and an inability to learn. A projected key role on the 2010-2011 Nets became yet another battle between Avery Johnson and a player whose education just wasn’t easy enough, the prospect of learning under an offensive mastermind in Rick Adelman became a disaster hidden at the end of the bench.
What was once a promising sophomore season was shredded to pieces by a refusal to make any progress. The impressive assist rate remained, but the turnovers ran so high that allowing Terrence to handle the ball became a near death sentence for an offense. The already horrendous shooting marks continued to drop into the dark depths of clunkerdom. Things were so bad that only 290 total minutes over the span of 21 games were registered in Terrence Williams’s yearly stat sheet, and with the way he preformed, one would find it difficult to blame any single coach. Potential, it seemed, had just failed.
With the lockout in full bloom, what little was left was supposed to fizzle away into the darkness. After all, players who sport motivational and/or mental issues rarely use long layoffs without pay to change their fortunes for the better.
Then again…
[flash http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UcybaTO3rmo&feature=player_embedded]
I mean, this is nothing. Gerald Green knew how to dunk during fast breaks too. And this is a random summer league game in a summer which saw virtually every NBA player take to such venues with half-joking scoring implosions. For every Kevin Durant Rucker Park legend we have a John Lucas III scoring 60 somewhere. This is as important as yet another report of sources close to Kobe Bryant saying that he’s maybe kinda considering sending his agent’s secretary to pretend to bump into a Besiktas official while just shopping in an Istanbul supermarket because “it may be really far from home and coincidentally really close to your home, but honestly, I always shop here, they have great organic vegetables!”.
But then again… did you see how high he jumped?! Did you see the shirt-ripping swag (if you ignore the walk of shame that concluded in putting it back on)? And it was against Derrick Caracter! That’s an NBA player! Don’t tell me that nonsense about how Derrick Caracter is awful, he has an NBA contract, he’s an NBA player, and Terrence Williams destroyed him!
I know what you’re saying. My head is saying it too. Terrence Williams just won’t happen. Too messed up, too stubborn, too many players ahead of him in this league who can claim a work ethic and basic understanding of basketball to go with perhaps slightly inferior talents. But this is what a lockout does to us. As we sit in our dark, basketball-less rooms and reminisce about that time we saw Joel Anthony airball a dunk, we cling to our old dreams and hopes, somehow reminding ourselves that the clearly impossible once seemed possible and might be such yet again. And no lost dream was quite as bright as the one of Terrence Williams, after he learned to take care of the ball and shoot and play defense and fit within the scheme of an actual basketball team. True, that sentence has more conditionals than your ideal player description, but the promise behind them is almost unparalleled.
Do I believe in Terrence Williams again? No. Part of me wants to, but I’m not sure anybody still does or still can. But a random pick-up game described by the immortal Trey Kerby as “possibly the most hilarious basketball game that has ever been played” reminded me of the hope that once was, and that still lies there, somehow. At the very least, that’s something Terrence Williams has given us.
