As the NBA regular season enters its final stages and most of its major storylines begin to wrap up, Zion Williamson has been on my mind lately. There are a couple reasons why.
The first is that March Madness is now in full swing, and around this time five years ago might have been when the promise of Zion shone brightest. The only NCAAB tournament game I’ve ever been to was Duke’s 2019 loss against Michigan State in the Elite Eight, where the number one seeded, 32-6 Zion-Reddish-Barrett juggernaut abruptly came to a halt. That was one of the more climactic sports moments of middle school for me — beyond even the 2015 title team, the 2019 Zion team was the best team I can recall Duke putting together since I started watching. Coach K’s last year had hope, but the Zion team had destiny. That one point loss, in which Zion put up a rugged 24-14-2-3-3 statline, felt like it never should have happened. There won’t be a Duke player as crushingly dominant as 2019 Zion again.
The second reason is that Zion Williamson’s current team has started playing very well. The New Orleans Pelicans seem in some ways to me like the NBA rendition of many Duke teams — they are loaded with individual talent but struggle to compellingly fit everyone together, with promising but inconsistent results. Currently, though, they are on a heater. Using Feb. 1 as a cutoff, the Pels have since won 17 games, tied for third in the NBA, and are second in overall net rating at a fantastic +8.9, per Cleaning the Glass. Their starting lineup has four absolutely premium players: CJ McCollum, Brandon Ingram, Herb Jones, and Zion Williamson are each positive starters on every team outside of Boston, and each are superlatively skilled in one major facet or another. Herb Jones in particular has leveled up into one of the better versions of the “3-and-D” archetype I’ve seen. But peculiarly — back to the fit issues — rolling out these four together is not at all how New Orleans wins games. Their two most used lineups with Zion, CJ, Jones, and Ingram have played opponents basically even across the season. Instead, the key to the Pelicans success has been mixing in their bench players. When the Pelicans decide to substitute one of Zion, or Ingram, or CJ, they pulverize their opposition.
Putting weird lineup stats aside — that’s not what NBA players are thinking about when Zion is barrelling at them in transition, anyway — recently, like the Pelicans, Zion is tending toward the dazzling side. That’s the third reason Zion’s been on my mind. He’s also been very good lately.
I understand it was the Pistons, but performances like he had on March 24, where he took all 14 of his shot attempts in the restricted area and made 13 of them, are reserved for Williamson only. Or March 15 against the Clippers, where he managed to get up 21 paint shots, sinking 14 of them. There is a distinct fear in how defenses have been guarding Zion, even when he is sizing his man up from the top of the three point line. He is not taking a shot anywhere farther than 10 feet from the basket, and everyone on the court knows that. But no defender in single coverage can stop him from getting to the rim. Hence a defensive alignment where two players are closer to the center of the free throw line than their own man, where the center is unconditionally stationed under the basket, where the defense preemptively rotates a third defender outside the restricted area in response to a ball screen. It makes a lot of easy offense for shooters like Trey Murphy III and McCollum, or anyone who can make an unguarded three above the break.
However, with Zion, there is increasingly one concern I can’t shake: at 23 years old, this sort of rim pressure appears to be the end of the road of Zion’s development. The first time he reached his typically historic rate of shot attempts at the basket was his second season, which still strongly contends with being his best. His defensive effort has waxed and waned over the last few seasons, and his jump shot has drifted into obsoletion. He has room to grow his right-handed finishing — one of the only counters to his drives is to force him off his dominant left (much easier said than done) — and could grow a more refined low post game. He could tighten his handle on drives and make quicker passing reads. But outside of the cycle of injury rehab and conditioning, not much on the top level changes from year to year with Zion, even at this early point of his career.
Of course, “this sort of rim pressure” can take Zion a long way, especially if he stays healthy and in shape. He’s authored some of the better first five years of anyone in NBA history. But I don’t know what his path is to becoming the MVP-level, championship-team-leading type of player he once projected as coming out of college.
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