Now likely to be moving on, he brought an exciting life to the Blazers
It’s game three. It’s
the first round of the NBA Playoffs. The
Rockets are playing the Blazers at home in the Rose Garden. Rip City is up two games to none, and there
is even talk of a sweep in the air. The
Rockets are in the lead, but they were in the lead the last two games as well
before the Blazers rallied in the fourth quarter and sunk their hopes. This game feels a little harder, a little
more difficult. The Rockets are not
giving an inch this time. But the
Blazers are mounting a comeback. It’s
within reach.
The score is 106-103, Rockets. There’s 2:42 left on the clock. Howard has gotten fouled again and is now at
the line. He guides the ball towards the
hoop in his strange gingerly way, and finally misses.
Batum rebounds the ball and hands it off to Mo Williams. Already Matthews and Lillard are filling the
wings. Down on the other end of the court
Aldridge pulls up to a stop near the top of the key on the left hand side. He readies himself to set a pin-down screen
for Williams’ man, Jeremy Lin, as soon as Williams will dash past him towards
the corner. Williams indeed drifts left
as he moves across the half court line, Lillard sliding to the top of the arc
and out of the way.
Now everything is set up, everything is in place to get
everyone involved, to choose the most precise way to strike.
And then Williams ignores all of it. He charges towards the left corner, past Lillard,
past Aldridge. Lin tries to stick his
body in the way. He keeps his hands up
and his chest out, pushing Williams to the sideline. Williams lowers his head more and slams the
ball to the ground with his left hand, making it past him. He then pulls up, his back to the basket,
switches to his right, and moves back up out of the corner up towards the wing. Aldridge is there setting the screen, and Williams
goes to meet it; then he abruptly changes direction, switches to his left hand
and drives baseline.
He is using the mere idea of the incoming screen itself—not
the reality of it, since he never gets near Aldridge at all and is never in a
position to run off it is—to get Lin to overplay him and leave open the
baseline. Lin tries to catch up and push him out of
bounds, hands outstretched, feet wide, sliding the whole time. Pounding away along the baseline Williams gets
Lin’s chest right in his shoulder, yet he manages to ram his way back inbounds
and towards the hoop. Lin now has to
push harder, and begins clearly to block him.
A foul is called just as Williams has pulled up to put up a right hand
floater which goes in.
The basket is waved off, but Williams sinks the free-throws,
bringing the Blazers within 1.
There’s still 2:35 left.
--
It's a random play from an important game. But this is the sort of thing Mo Williams does. In seven seconds, Williams goes coast to
coast, abruptly dashes past a defender, fights with him physically while taking
exquisite care of the ball in his off hand, and creates useful, crucial points. He needs no other people, no help, nothing,
just him and the basket.
When the entire character of
the game seems to call for greater interdependence of all the working
parts—more screens set, more passes—he ignores this, and turns on the
jets. Mo Williams becomes unpredictable,
becomes a mystery, and others can only stand back and watch and see what
happens.
It is a terrifying thing to see, and it terrifies fans. If some of them were edgy about the Blazers resigning
him next year, now that he has opted to become a free-agent, this was why. Explain to them that this unpredictability is
relatively systematic, is accounted for sometimes as a built in option in Terry
Stotts’ offense, and you are met with the same unrelenting skepticism as
before. Williams just presses all the
wrong buttons with the Portland fanbase, who are loath to extend their trust
and their fidelity to such uncertain quantities—until they do so, as everyone
well knows, completely, utterly, without abandon. Williams, though they respect his
achievements with the team and absolutely value his contributions, hasn’t quite
proven himself certain enough, and it’s likely his very style of play made it
forever impossible this would happen.
Who can blame them? They
sense there is something risky about Williams, and risk has historically
brought this franchise something that is the opposite of good fortune. After all the injuries, after all the busts,
after all the hopes dashed, they would like a little consistency, a little
predictability. Some—any—reliability.
Don’t get them wrong, of course: they are all about the ride,
the crazy ups and downs of basketball and the thrill this brings. The Rockets series will live in their memories
forever because of this rollercoaster, the ecstatic celebration followed by the
doom and gloom followed by the amazing, unbelievable, last-second triumph in
Game 6. But things have been looking
good, looking professional, looking a bit more stable after the end of the Oden
saga, the hiring of Neil Olshey, and the hiring of Terry Stotts and the
acquisition of Damian Lillard. Williams often
plays with a disturbing kind of force, an energy that comes at all the right
times, yet in the wrong way.
And what’s particularly annoying is that there’s nothing
this anxiety can do, either. Just like
he seems to deal with everything else, Williams ignores all of this, and stays
true to how he has always been, which is unpredictable. With the likelihood that he may be signing
with another franchise next year, though, perhaps some of the anxiety will
subside and we can breathe calmly enough to take a longer look at that
unpredictability.
--
Williams has something of a tic. Whether it is a habit or an involuntary gesture
isn’t clear, but it can be seen often on the court. Whenever he dribbles hard, he brings out the
arm that isn’t dribbling, and holds it parallel to the floor, almost as if he
is making a gesture urging everything around him to calm down, calm down. Or as if he were urging himself to do this.
Obviously it is a gesture that has its practical utilities:
like everything in sports, it is not meant primarily to signify but to execute,
to effect a result. And indeed this
gesture allows him to switch hands quickly, to keep his balance continually—a balance
on the court that is one of the best among point guards, and which, not unlike
that of Tony Parker, allows him to run around and make strange curls in the
paint that devastate defenses.
But significance can’t be escaped either, and so the movement
of his hands also appears like a gesture of self-restraint. It rights the body and keeps it poised. As if something continually needed to be
curtailed or curbed. As if it needed to
be kept under control.
And this is what seems to be true about Williams throughout
his career: there lies an intense ennervation, sometimes giddy, always eager,
behind each one of his actions, behind each one of his words, which he has,
simply for the sake of getting along, gotten under control, but which will
assert itself if only a little room is given to it to go about its business and
take over. A scouting
report for the 2003 draft said that he was “an extremely quick point guard
with plenty of stamina to play big minutes.”
Even then that force, that power, keeping him going, to propel him
onward, was visible. It was already
clear that, at his core, Williams is simply a bundle of energy.
It is probably no accident then that Mo’s father worked in
an electric power plant. It’s a bit too
fitting to sound true, really, but it is indeed a fact. As a manager at the plant, Isaiah Williams
was undoubtedly quite familiar with the complications of dealing with an excess
of energy, of keeping it under control but also allowing it to flow in
abundance. He too was an athlete as a
kid—one imagines that while playing football at Mississippi Valley State he may
have also showed signs of such overflowing spark.
Looking over the record and finding details like these, we
get a picture of Williams’ childhood that seems nurturing, however wild and far
from normal life gets for him as he grows up.
Along with his father working in the power plant, there is Williams’
mother Griceldia teaching in special education.
Like her father, she most likely sets a good example for Mo: instructing
people in how to use their energies productively in the world seems like a very
enabling and empowering role model to have.
Mo’s relationship to his siblings, too, seems to be a good one. Their intimacy was attested recently when
Williams missed a game to visit his older sister Marcia who was struck suddenly
by an illness. Along with her, now a
social worker still living in Jackson, Williams has the example of an athletic
older brother Michael who goes on to play football for Army before becoming a
tire salesman, and the support of one younger brother, Montrell.
There is, though, the fundamental fact of the busy atmosphere
of his native environment: Jackson, Mississippi. Jackson is hot, sweltering, aflame. Relief is not quite found in the Pearl River,
which flows from the big reservoir north of the city down through it, curving
and creating steamy wetlands around which it is built, to pass on down to the
Gulf, somewhere between Biloxi and New Orleans.
Every once and a while a thunderstorm explodes—Jackson lies in a
specific weather corridor that produces intense freak rainstorms—not so much to
cool things down as to shake up all the elements and create a general mess of
things.
This heat and this weather are only a part of the general
excitement and business that characterizes Williams’ boyhood as it unfolds. From an early age his father gets him
involved in athletics. He plays
football, though after hurting his knee in the eighth grade he would shy away
from it. He plays baseball assiduously, especially
the more mentally fatiguing positions of shortstop and pitcher. He also is continually traveling across the
South, playing with his AAU team—the New Orleans Jazz. Not unlike his future teammate, LeBron James,
he plays deep into AAU playoffs, getting knocked out only in the semifinals. Throughout his youth, he garners encouragement
from coaches who respected his seemingly endless reserves of strength, which he
put into practicing hours and hours in the gym.
Williams cultivates tight bonds with friends and family,
almost as if to make it through the ever-changing environment outside those
circles, as well as everything that militates against success or makes it
awkward and difficult, doubtful and intimidating. The most memorable friendships he forms are
at William B. Murrah High school, which lies near the river across the 55
freeway running alongside it in an attractive neighborhood, next to the
University of Mississippi medical campus and several other vocational schools.
Williams in his years there grows close to six
other friends—several of them seniors in school. They all share an affection for mob movies,
and think of themselves as something of a miniature mafia. They give Mo the nickname Mo Gotti, after the
famous leader of the Gambinos. He still
has a tattoo on his leg that each of them got before Mo left to college: it says
“La Familia.”
Williams’ talents individually begin to shine as soon as he dedicates
himself to basketball on entering high school.
Murrah has an excellent basketball program and is nationally
ranked. It has produced several NBA
talents, including James Robinson, who played on the Blazers from 1993 through
1996, and Lindsey Hunter, who played for the Pistons. Under Bob Frith, who when Mo came to the
school had taken over the role of head coach four years prior, Mo’s team plays
fast and quick, and takes advantage of his speed. They also play an impressive half-court
trapping defense that tears through opponents. Together, they go to the state
finals when he is a junior.
Williams, it seems, has plenty of energy to use on both ends
of the court, against the most challenging contenders. “He played offense a lot
in high school,” Frith said
in an interview in 2008, but he was also my best defensive player,” he made
sure to add. “He always took our opponent's
best offensive guard.” Mo becomes a McDonald’s All-American, and Mississippi
Gatorade player of the year in his Senior Year.
--
In 2005, after he made it into the NBA and was playing for
the Bucks, Williams got on the phone with Ronald Steele, then playing with Alabama
(he is currently a player for PMS Torino in Italy), and talked to him about
what he could expect in the point guard slot.
“Little things he learned and picked up after the fact he said he wished
he knew at the time,” as Steele put it.
He had sought out Williams before for advice, and Williams happily gave
it. Steele
spoke to an interviewer about the most important thing Williams told him: "He was always telling me that I had to step in and be
confident, because the guys were going to feed off of that. The biggest thing he told me was to stay
confident through the good and the bad."
“The guys were going to feed off of that” -- this is the
most important part of this quote. In
the coming years in Williams career, everyone who sees or meets Williams is
enthralled not just by his energy, but how it radiates, how it energizes, what
it does to teams. Williams will stress
this in post-game interviews in years to come.
Ennervation, excitement, in the next years of his career are continually
channeled into making teammates better, into leading teams on, sometimes even
with irrational levels of confidence, toward victory.
After highschool, Williams goes to the University of Alabama
to play for the Crimson Tide. There, he shines.
His first season, he averages 1.4 points and 4.5 assists a game. Bama goes on to be undefeated at home, and enter
the NCAA tournament as a 2 seed, after winning the whole conference. The SEC names
him Freshman of the Year.
He plays point guard initially, but in his second year,
Coach Mark Gottfried moves Antoine Pettway to the point. Williams scores more and passes less. There
are initial struggles—he starts the season cold—but Gottfried has faith in
Williams’ shot, which is good.
Eventually Mo’s shooting gets better, he dominates in the role and comes
to lead the team in scoring. He averages
16.4 points and 3.8 assists per game.
During this, we see him developing the tools necessary to
invigorate and excite those around him.
He begins taking over the role of the team leader even as a freshman, on
a team that is stacked with seniors. As
in highschool, he has no fear of seeing himself as older and more mature than
his immediate peers. We find him giving
halftime speeches when team is down .
In interviews after games Gottfried speaks continually of Mo’s intensity
and how it always shows up on the court: “Great players’ tickers inside are
different than others and Mo is one of them,” he says. “Mo has a
tremendous passion and desire to win, and he's a great competitor."
“A leader is someone who tells you that those seats are blue
and you don’t argue with them,” Williams tells a reporter after a practice. He is gesturing to the seats in the gym. The seats are not blue, but red. “People listen to leaders, whether it be on
the floor during a play or about an assignment, any little thing. That comes from leading off the floor,
communicating with everyone all the time and not being distant.”
It’s an interesting statement, but not only for what it says
about leadership. It says a lot about
the type of commitment that he feels is required—that he feels he requires. For Williams, leading is not a matter of
simply saying something in which people can agree and support. Leading isn’t merely the act of convincing
someone to follow you. Rather, it is
transmitting conviction, through constant attention to everyone else on your
squad. Not being distant. Being always there, off the floor as well as
on it. The result is a consensus that is
so definite it approaches being almost hallucinogenic, turning red chairs blue.
Much of the credit for the team's success can be traced to
Williams' play. Mike Davis, Hoosiers coach, attested
to how much Williams was feared when he was discussing whether he wanted to
schedule a game against them during the regular season: “I wanted to play them
this year, but then I saw Maurice Williams, and I decided I would wait until he
was gone.” He didn’t have to wait long. After a first round loss those very Hoosiers,
Williams declared for the 2003 NBA draft.
--
Ike Williams (people call him Ike) says of Mo, right before the draft: "He may not be a
first-rounder, but no one has said he won't be an NBA player. He's a
competitor. He understands that he is going to have to go and make a
team."
It sounds another note, which shall be a theme in Williams’
many years in the NBA to come--the
harsh note of realism. If Williams
excelled in his early career off of the incredible internal strength, now he
would have to bring it up against obstacles.
Sure, there were obstacles every day playing competitively in highschool
and college. But in the NBA, at the
professional level, impediments exist that are not able to be overcome, that
are not able to be surmounted. Learning
to live with those, to dodge around them, rather than to try and simply hammer
away and hope they disappear, meanwhile wasting all that energy--this is a
skill at which he will need to become adept.
Initially, things look bleak. Williams was, of course, going into a stacked
draft, which included LeBron and Carmelo Anthony. He is drafted 47th by the Jazz and
send to sit a lot on the bench. He is
released at the end of the year. Some
look at that period of his career as, in the words of
Andrew Sharp, mostly “bouncing around NBA no-man’s land.” But, compared to what might have happened at
this point, it is remarkable that he was able to do what he did. Because as soon as the Jazz let him go, the
Bucks pick him up, and he seizes the occasion.
We wouldn’t think that savvy and trickiness was a skill that
naturally accompanied enthusiasm, but if we it define it along the lines of
knowing precisely when to press your luck, precisely when to bring that energy
to bear, we can understand how Williams would go on to become a hit in Milwalkee. Thre, it is initially looking like he will
play rotation minutes as a backup point-guard and 2-man when suddenly the
Bucks’ primary pointguard T.J. Ford is injured. Williams immediately steps in to play the
position, and puts up big numbers quickly. He averages 10.2 points per game and
6.1 assists, some of the best numbers on the team. He brings everything that he needed to bring,
at exactly the right time. In
retrospect, it is as if his struggles were only a matter of him waiting for the
right occasion to show what he could do.
He is, in other words, a thrilling success. In his second year on the team, when Terry
Stotts took over from coach Terry Porter, he increases his efficiency as a
point guard by lowering his turnover rate, and adds the three-ball to his game,
ending up shooting 38.2% from beyond the arc, second on the team only to Toni
Kukoc. He endears himself to fans by
producing “The Mo Williams Show,” a wonderful, extremely campy, one minute
rapid-fire interview piece with his fellow players that runs at time-outs and halftime in the Bradley Center. The team wins 40 games and almost breaks
.500, which is enough to squeeze into the playoffs before making an exit in the
first round to the Pistons. In the
following year, he comes back and puts up his best numbers yet in the NBA: 17.3
PPG and 6.2 assists. He is courted by the Miami Heat as a free agent, then
brought back to Milwalkee for a $52 million, six-year deal.
The 2007-2008 season goes similarly, but what follows is
another instance of his mastery of timing: not too long after signing his big
deal to commit, he ends up on the best team in the East, playing besides the
best player in the planet. Somehow, Williams
has made himself into a “high-scoring point guard,” a strange combination of
qualities which is exactly what the Cleveland Cavaliers are looking for at the
time: LeBron never had a player on the Cavs who averaged more than 17 points,
and needs someone to take some of the pressure off of him offensively. Williams fits exactly the profile they are
looking for. In a 3-team deal between
the Bucks, the Cavs, and Oklahoma City, Williams gets traded.
The city heralds his arrival. He is called a “top playmaker,” someone who
will “rejuvenate” the team. And his
performance ends up being stellar. He
puts up 17 points and 4.1 assists a game.
What is most remarkable is that he shoots, for the year, 44% from the three-point
line. They give him a new nickname, “The
Hitman,” after he displays a knack for hitting clutch shots and deep threes
almost out of nowhere. There is a
vigorous campaign on Cleveland’s behalf to send him to the All-Star Game
alongside LeBron and, after Jameer Nelson gets hurt and Chris Bosh decides to
sit out the game to nurse an injury, he in fact makes it. He plays 16 minutes, goes 5 for 10 and 2 for
5 from behind the line, and scores 12 points—the fifth most on the team. As the season continues, much of the
success—the team has the leading record in the East for much of the season—is
attributed to Mo working in tandem with LeBron: “Just look at the wins and
losses from last year to this year,” LeBron says. The team has, he points out, “really only one
addition - Mo Williams.” As Sports
Illustrated puts it, he is “the diminutive
Pippen to James's Jordan.”
It is not enough, however, to take them past Orlando in the
Eastern Conference Finals, and from then on no one is making these analogies
anymore. The next season, with the
arrival of Shaq, decreases his shot attempts.
He still proves to be a valuable member of the team, but analysts are
quicker to criticize, and, looking at his shot-selection in particular, begin
to fault recklessness where they once admired aggression.
His reaction to the leaving of LeBron is well known. He posts many messages on
Twitter. It is full of emotion, full
of a sense of failure at being unable to make the team good enough for LeBron
and for himself. He finds it to be
sad. He is shocked. He asks fans to make the team sign him again
and make sure he returns, even if LeBron doesn’t. One feels, reading him, like he lets the
intensity of his emotion overcome him.
But it is also yet another effort to hope beyond hope that something of
his inner intensity can inspire.
Eventually, though, while the Cavs resign him and he plays
for them for a year, they quickly trade him to the Clippers in a deal that nets
them a first round draft pick—what would become Kyrie Irving, the future of
their franchise and the distant possibility (now fulfilled) of getting LeBron
to return. For the Clippers, he plays very
serviceable minutes coming off of the bench as a sixth man. After being shuffled around from there to the
Jazz, he eventually ends up on the Blazers.
--
“Mo is an explosive scorer and willing facilitator,” Neil
Olshey, the Blazers’ GM, said upon the team acquiring him last year.
He says this casually, as if these two things are about as
compatible as can be. But they really
are opposite principles, cohabiting about as impossibly as could be imagined.
Someone who is explosively scoring typically can’t be an
offensive threat—to score explosively is to score only in short bursts, without
consistency—and yet on the other hand isn’t an athlete (because he is a scorer,
most likely a shooter, not someone who gets to the hoop). And yet Williams is exactly both of these
things, without being purely one or the other.
In fact, it is because he isn’t one or the other—a mere combination of
the two—that he is both.
Facilitators, too, should simply be facilitating, they don’t
have to will themselves to be doing this—that would make what they were doing
something other than easy. A willing
facilitator is a contradiction in terms: he facilitates only by willing himself
to do so, not at all—as facilitators normally do—by stepping out of the
way. And yet Williams somehow manages to
bring his facilitating role into the service of his will, and to bring his will
into the service of his facilitating role, because he is not too much of one,
nor wholly the other. He is only able to
be characterized by the mere conjunction of these two terms. He is both, while being neither alone.
Neil Olshey seems to recognize Williams’s ability to combine
all these contradictory qualities. He
recognizes that what lies at the heart of his game, his style, his personality,
is in fact this strange ability to live within extremes. The roles he inhabits might not be
reconciled, but Williams remains capable, strangely, of thriving in all of
them.
The Blazers had been angling to get him since 2010, and were
involved in trade rumors even
then, in short, because they seem to have understood something at the core
of the energetic Mo Williams. They grasp,
at the time, what his immense energy can be ultimately translated into and
understood as: not to play one role the best he can, but to be something that
could be possibly multiple roles. A desire
to live as much of life as possible, to live it as intensely as possible, and
in as many ways as possible. To take up
as many different chances as possible, and to take advantage of all of them at
once. To never rest until life is led
ecstatically, almost without control, on the brink, in so many ways at once
that even Williams sometimes appears not to understand which ways he is living.
This is not a role that professional athletes usually take
up: they usually seek out comfort, seek out harmony, seek out ways to stay
centered and to reduce randomness in life.
They practice every day of their lives, repeat things countless times,
to remove themselves from climates of extremes, where it isn’t clear how events
will turn out. They push themselves to
achieve a state where they can be absolutely certain of the outcome of their
intentions, not to do things that result in something bizarre and confusing. Far from courting puzzled interpretation,
being ambiguous and multi-faceted, they seek to refine down their identities to
sleek, easy to appreciate entities, clear expressions of singular desires. Statistics and awards, they will say, cannot
account for an athlete’s achievements.
But in many ways everything about them is precisely an effort to be
summed up in such ways. Not 3, not 4,
not 5 championships, perhaps—as LeBron once put it—but 6 or 7, surely.
Nevertheless, this is the route that a certain kind of player
can indeed take if his motivation is something like the pure enthusiasm which
motivates Williams. If he finds that life
for him is best lived at extremes, when it isn’t ever quite clear what he is,
who he is, whether he is one thing or that thing’s opposite. And this is the spirit that Williams brought
to the Blazers this year, arguably one of the best years of his career.
We might need to use the word “arguably,” because it was not
the most productive year for Williams personally: he averages, in this year, only
9.7 points and 4.3 assists per game, and plays on average only 24.8 minutes—all
numbers that, excluding his rookie season, are the lowest of his career. But never does he seem to be as essential to
an offense as he does during Portland’s raucous 54 win season and the deepest
playoff run it makes in over a decade, a season which features so many buzzer
beaters and clutch plays of in which Williams is a strange and crucial component.
He comes in firing off the bench, runs the point,
and—perhaps most important—plays as a crucial substitute for Wes Matthews or
Lillard at the 2-spot which allows the rotation unprecedented flexibility,
stamina, and endurance through a long season.
He also wins games for the team. There are not a few in which Williams sinks a
clutch 2-pointer with the clock running low in the fourth quarter. The long-two seems, indeed, to be an aspect
of his game that he worked on and developed almost especially for this year, so
often does it appear out of nowhere and provide exactly the basket that the
Blazers need to shift momentum in a game and bring them out of a funk.
He also, finally, plays well in the playoffs, until a
hamstring injury sidelines him for the last three games of the series against
San Antonio. This in particular is what
makes this season feel like it is, if not his best, than one of his most
satisfying seasons yet: in no season prior to this one has Williams actually played
well in the playoffs. With LeBron’s
Cavaliers, he put up depressingly bad numbers.
On his other teams, he rarely got a chance to shine. In the playoffs back in Milwalkee he did
tolerably, but not anywhere near as well as he does with Portland. In this playoff run of the Blazers, he proves
a vital component of the team’s success: he averages 1.8 assists and 7 points a
game, and puts up two outstanding performances: in the second game against the
Rockets, he scores 13 points, and his 17 points in Game 3 keep the Blazers in
it until overtime.
Most intriguingly perhaps, though, is that over the course
of his season in Portland he becomes the one component of an efficient clockwork
offensive system which could actually totally confuse a defense, deceive them, and
rattle any confidence that it had recently developed about knowing exactly how
to play the Blazers.
The Blazers run a rather transparently team-based offense:
they do not use much isolation, but rather systemic and coordinated attacks,
which do not involve the shotmaker’s ability to create so much as the ability
of the team to produce space for him.
They launch fusillades of long balls at the hoop, and break teams down
by repetition and variation, rather than through selective improvisation. But Mo Williams this year for the Blazers
used this very stability against defenses, running isolations for himself and
pick and roll plays that never utilized the roll man, which completely left
defenses wondering what team they were playing.
It seems to be a season in which he most capitalizes upon
the confusing, conflicting nature of his game.
In the play above, what ends up being a fake—that move up towards the
screen of Aldridge—could indeed just as well have not been one. He could indeed have used the screen: everything
physically was lined up for the use of it, everything in his body is still
ready, at that moment, to be taken in that direction as well as the one he
actually takes. He is so under control
that there is no signal the fake was a fake, no tell, almost as if it wasn’t
even clear to Williams himself what on earth he was doing, whether he was going
to use the screen or not.
He doesn’t do this physically, by overpowering the
opponent. This isn’t just isolation, but
something more elaborate: he uses the whole idea that the Blazers would set up
an offense at all as a decoy, really—the idea that nobody would be bold enough
in such a sophisticated team system to actually do something so off the rails,
that so would disregard it. He uses
straightforwardness to conceal, he plays off of transparency to deceive. Where people expect him to inhabit one role
within the offense, he multiplies this role.
And he is the most effective scorer off of the bench this year because
he is able to do more than one thing at once like this. Or rather to be more than one thing at
once. To be as many things at once as possible. To be contradictory, even to himself.
--
In the end, though, the most memorable thing in Williams’
tenure in Portland, will have been the way he fit seamlessly into the
team. Williams seemed to sweep into
Portland and mesh with the team culture so quickly and effortlessly, it is
almost as if he were with this squad for years.
But this might have had less to do with his affability or his
pleasantness as a person—to which many can attest—as the sheer fact that his
style, his identity, so thoroughly seemed to blend with the spirit of this last
season. If there was one thing that this
season had, it was energy. So many games
were absolutely thrilling, went down to the wire, were won just at the buzzer,
and so many outcomes were unpredictable and unclear, it seemed as if the team
was almost built to be in these situations.
The team seems to have a more stable sense of identity than
Mo, in the end, but what happened to it this year, with all its ups and downs,
showed that its players were quite happy to take up the spirit Williams had
embodied for so long and developed over such a twisting career and embrace the
uncertainty, court the risky situation, live in the conflicting and
contradictory atmosphere, where outcomes are uncertain, where one doesn’t even
know exactly what one is doing.
In this respect, Williams was perhaps one of the most
significant examples for the Blazer players.
He was, in a strange way, almost a teacher for many of them, someone
they could look to as a source for inspiration when there was a question about
how, exactly, one could play more intensely, and in fact embrace the extremes
and the unpredictability that inevitably follows. It is for this reason, perhaps, that many of
them, especially Damian Lillard, wanted him to come back for another season. It was a unique fit, unique for Williams in
the long arc of his career, and unique for the team, in its development into a
steady and stable, but also flexible and clutch, fighting unit.
Williams has, fittingly, proven unpredictable yet again, and
instead of committing to the team has gone into free agency. The Blazers cannot offer him a new contract,
because it would commit too much money to fit with their long term plans, and
so they have, while Williams has seen what the market has in store for him,
replaced him with Steve Blake—a more affordable and predictable (though in many
ways no less effective) player. He
hopefully will indeed sign with Dallas, so as to be closer to his home (in that
city) and The Mo Williams Academy, an institution he set up to help teach
basketball to kids in the community and from around the nation. There he will be able to live with his family
and possibly move into a career in broadcasting, a field he has expressed
interest in in the past, and made strides in this year as well (he served as
the role of analyst for NBA TV for one of the San Antonio-Oklahoma City playoff
games).
It is unfortunate for his fans in Portland, though perhaps somewhat
good for their sanity. The
volatility—the voltage—of Williams was often too much to handle. But they will also understand—like the
players of their current roster no doubt understand—a special type of vitality will
also be lost when he goes, and be brought with him to Dallas and wherever he
may chance to be in the future.
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