Difficult Offseason Awaits the Kings
Jason Williams has thrived on turbulence, so it was no surprise his third NBA season ended in another controversy.
Moments after the Sacramento Kings’ best season in two decades ended at the hands of the Los Angeles Lakers, the Kings’ starting point guard and second most-recognizable player stood at his locker and denounced the organization that made him famous while he helped lead it to new heights of success and notoriety.
Unhappy with his dwindling role and angry at the Kings’ four straight losses to the Lakers, Williams barely stopped short of demanding a trade, but left no doubt he was unhappy with the coaching staff and his playing time.
“I don’t know if being here is best for me,” he said. “I want what’s best for me. I’m worried about myself now. . . . It’s time to look out for me. You get told two different things sometimes. It’s just a lot of stuff.”
Now there’s an offseason of uncertainty for the short kid with the street-ball game, the army of tattoos and even a uniform number--55--designed to make opponents and fans rethink their image of the prototypical point guard.
The Kings, meanwhile, face a quandary just as difficult to handle as the impending free agency of Chris Webber. What do they do with Williams, whose exciting game has become one of the team’s most recognizable features, but whose unpredictability and boorish behavior already have hurt Sacramento’s reputation?
“Jason is at an important part of his development,” said Pete Carril, the Kings’ veteran assistant coach and former head coach at Princeton. “He’s learning how to be a player and how to be a human being. I hope he doesn’t let what he’s feeling interfere with the bigger picture.”
Despite starting 77 games (after being suspended for the first five), Williams had a rocky regular season. He averaged career lows of 9.4 points, 5.4 assists and 2.4 rebounds per game, and opponents mercilessly targeted him on defense.
Though Williams was his usual ebullient self around his teammates, he avoided the media for weeks at a time. Williams’ teammates are his closest friends, but his surrogate family in Sacramento had an added layer of tension all season because of his troubles with playing time and NBA discipline.
Three years after he burst onto the national scene, Williams is still a puzzle. There seems to be no definitive opinion on whether his positive features outweigh his negatives--even on his own team.
“When Jason plays under control and plays the way we like to see, he’s got everybody’s support,” coach Rick Adelman said. “It’s still an ongoing process. He’s still learning how to play this game.”
The Kings drafted Williams in 1998 with the seventh overall pick, which most league observers thought was too high for a talented but erratic guard who was kicked out of Florida for drug use. Proving his doubters wrong, Williams exploded on the NBA scene with a dazzling array of flashy passes and long-distance shots.
While he appeared to make progress toward a more mature game by cutting down on turnovers this season, he was stung by an ugly incident in Oakland in which he made slurs about Asians and gays while bickering with Warriors fans at courtside. Williams was fined $15,000.
It wasn’t the first time Williams had drawn attention for conversing with fans. He has been sensitive to catcalls since his rookie season, and he was fined after each of the Kings’ trips to San Antonio this year.
“It doesn’t matter what my side of the story is,” Williams said after he was fined $25,000 for the second incident in San Antonio last month. “People are going to say what they want to say, and nobody wants to hear what I have to say. But it’s OK.”
Even while his play tailed off, the Kings gave Williams remarkable freedom. Adelman left Williams in the starting lineup despite scores of terrible shots and bad passes that would have meant a benching for perhaps any other player in the NBA.
“Jason doesn’t do as well when he’s constricted,” Adelman said. “We saw that in his playing history. We’re just trying to let him play his game, and hope he picks up the rest in time.”
But that patience didn’t often extend to the fourth quarter. Bobby Jackson played almost all of the Kings’ significant late-game minutes at the point, and Williams finished the season with nearly 500 fewer minutes played than he had in 1999-00.
Jackson isn’t flashy, but his standout defense and careful ball-handling made him a more attractive late-game choice than Williams, who usually sat and stewed near the end of the bench with a towel on his head.
“I don’t know what this organization wants from me,” Williams said late in the regular season. “I’m just going to keep bringing my game, and we’ll see where things go.”
He played just 19 minutes in the Kings’ final game, perhaps prompting his angry denunciation of the team.
“We just got swept,” said Geoff Petrie, the Kings’ vice president of basketball operations. “We didn’t play particularly well, and he didn’t play particularly well. It’s not the proper time to deal with these emotions. He’s frustrated.”
A day after the season ended, Kings owners Gavin and Joe Maloof met with Williams’ father, Terry, who didn’t request a trade. The Maloof brothers said they emerged from the meeting with renewed confidence in Williams’ commitment.
Webber and Williams, both known as misbehaving malcontents at previous stops in their basketball careers, reached something near their full potential in Sacramento. Adelman allowed both to play to their natural instincts, and the result was three years of often spectacular basketball.
Webber, tired of small-town Sacramento, has all but admitted he’ll go elsewhere during the offseason. It seems natural to wonder whether Webber and Williams, who complemented each other so well the past three years, could be moved to a new team together.
“I don’t know what will happen with anybody on this team,” Webber said. “Jason is a great player. I’ll always believe in him.”