Friday 24 January 2020 11:49, UK
To the more paranoid among us, there is always a worrying moment at the very start of a commercial plane flight.
The plane is invariably thundering along the ground at some speed, and has been for about 20 seconds, yet that 20 seconds feels like a couple of minutes. You start thinking, is everything alright? Shouldn't we have lifted off by now? Are we running out of runway? Are we too heavy to take off?
The New Orleans Pelicans were fortunate enough to land the first overall pick in the most recent NBA Draft, and with it, they drafted Zion Williamson out of Duke University. And every other team would have done the same. The excellent play thus far this season of Ja Morant of the Memphis Grizzlies should not lead to any revisionist history - Williamson was the clear first overall pick at the time, and Memphis would have taken him No 1 as well.
Zion had been the consensus No 1 even before his one year in college, and his performance in that season - 22.6 points and a whole bunch of other numbers in only 30 minutes per game, on an electric .702 per cent true shooting percentage - left no room for doubt.
In his first and only season with the Blue Devils, Williamson was an absolute phenomenon, completely unstoppable offensively and a captivating mix of power, athleticism, skill and finesse. Comparisons to Charles Barkley and others were made, but such comparisons were always slightly forced, because there has not ever been a player of this size playing this brand of basketball this well. With this one stroke of luck, then, New Orleans repositioned their entire franchise.
That same large size however did lead to concerns about Zion's longevity. It is all well and good that he is able to leap as explosively and as often as he does while carrying all that weight around, but each landing will surely take a little something out of him.
By way of example, Blake Griffin, now of the Detroit Pistons, came into the league as an athletic and physical freight train too, yet he has developed into a skill-based player over the years, as the freight-train thing only works for so long. As the injuries piled up, the lingering pains worsened, the joints stiffened and the explosion left him, he has had to adjust. As an even bigger man than Griffin, then, and in clearly carrying around some puppy fat that he did not need, there seemed legitimate cause for concern for Zion's career prognosis if he was going to stay at this size.
Those fears proved somewhat founded when Zion immediately hurt his knee. He first injured his right knee in a summer league game back in July, then aggravated the problem in the Pelicans' final preseason contest and had to undergo surgery to repair a torn meniscus, subsequently not able to make his official NBA debut until Wednesday. Just as Griffin missed his entire rookie campaign due to a broken kneecap, the concern is that the Gift of Zion might be wasted if jumping-related lower body injuries were always going to get in the way.
In last night's eagerly anticipated return, despite seemingly being on a minutes limit (something officially denied by the team yet which looked undeniable considering the few minutes he played in total, and his notable absence in crunch time), Williamson started the game. How could he not? Everyone was there to see him. Williamson did however start the game very badly - playing roughly the first three minutes of every quarter, he was pretty bad in the first three of them, out of rhythm with the game, and out of shape.
Spot minutes in one contest is of course a ridiculously small sample size, considering how brilliant Zion had been in college. It was however plenty enough ammunition for the professional cynics, especially in light of the shape that Zion was in (or rather, not in). Jeff van Gundy on the broadcast openly opined as to whether Morant should have been picked first after all, and online, a comparison was made to the notoriously overweight Oliver Miller, a fallacy of an argument that conveniently forgets the 23.5 points per game Zion averaged in preseason before the injury.
Nevertheless, the disjointed nature of his play, combined with the optics, led to doubters. Was Zion going to be too big to succeed in the NBA? Is the plane ever going to take off? Is it too heavy to fly?
Certainly, Williamson looked discombobulated. He recorded two points, three rebounds and two turnovers in the first half, and had five turnovers in his first 12 minutes of game time. Looking easily fatigued as well, all the hype surrounding his debut - understandable considering his quality, yet ultimately unfair considering his youth and injury - went down like a lead balloon.
Until, that is, the fourth quarter.
With his Pelicans team down by a considerable margin to the San Antonio Spurs, Zion hit a gear that it did not look as though he had within him through the first three quarters. He scored 17 consecutive points in a fearsome stretch, including 4-for-4 shooting on three-pointers, the one area of his offensive game that it was thought he did not yet have developed.
Even though Williamson was hot from outside, however, he did not succumb to the temptation of firing up more outside looks and heat-checking himself into an inefficient night. Instead, he kept running to the post, looking to establish position, trying to work himself all over the half-court as the multi-option threat that makes him such an alluring potential star.
Just as 12 bad minutes do not define a career, nor do six good ones. That said, showing not only his shot-making talents but also his decision-making and his willingness to keep going even when things are not going his way, Williamson showed a lot of the intangibles that further separate him from the field, beyond the physical advantages. I don't know if we can ever have said the same about Oliver Miller.
The concerns regarding Zion's weight, hardiness, longevity and defence remain, and it does seem indisputable that Williamson could stand to shed a bit of timber. But just as it looks like the plane is never going to rotate and get in the sky, it does. The plane always takes off eventually.
