The most annoying thing about Arkansas star Jaylin Williams — if you ask almost anyone who played against him in the SEC last season — is also perhaps the least likely thing about his game to carry over from college to the NBA. But it also gives us the biggest clue about why he’s a pro prospect at all. While Williams drove opponents crazy drawing an NCAA-best 54 charges last season, most of those didn’t just happen by accident (or even acting, as is so often the outcry). They were the product of preparation and feel.
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“It just came from me always knowing where to be and when to be there,” Williams says. “A lot of my game is just reading the game and processing what’s going on. That just comes from me studying film, studying guys’ tendencies, studying their plays and what they do with guys in certain positions.”
Put another way: The 6-foot-10 Williams, a former top-100 recruit who blossomed from role player into a double-double machine as a sophom*ore for the Razorbacks, is “one of the most cerebral players that I’ve ever been around,” Arkansas coach Eric Musselman says. That’s what the Oklahoma City Thunder got when they picked Williams 34th overall in the 2022 NBA Draft on Thursday night.
Musselman, former head coach of the Warriors and Kings and an assistant for four other NBA teams, planned to curtail Williams’ charge-taking if he’d come back for another season with the Hogs. There’s too much emphasis on verticality in the pros — and way too many collisions in an 82-game (or more) schedule — to play that way. “You’d get beat to death,” Musselman says. Even if it’s about to become a much less effective weapon, that doesn’t diminish how impressive it was to watch Williams master the art of taking a charge.
“He really, really understands defensive spacing, defensive awareness, and he’s a great weak-side helper,” Musselman says. “You can’t even really put a value on how much that meant to us, all those charges he took, because what does that equate to point-wise for us? They don’t score and we get the ball back. He just affected so many areas for us.”
Williams jumped from 15.9 minutes, 3.7 points and 4.7 rebounds per game as a freshman to starting 35 games and averaging 10.9 points, 9.8 boards, 2.6 assists, 1.3 steals and 1.1 blocks per game as a sophom*ore. He made 24 of 94 career 3s, which is just 25.5 percent, but it’s not too hard to imagine him becoming a decent threat from the perimeter. He shot 73.1 percent from the free-throw line for his career.
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“He’ll continue to evolve and improve as a shooter,” Musselman says. “You’re getting a high basketball IQ, one of the best passers in the draft, a guy well beyond his experience and age in understanding offensive and defensive spacing, and one of the best help defenders in the draft. There were multiple games down the stretch where he made big-time plays for us, whether it was an and-one or a big 3 or putting his body on the line to take charges.”
Williams made the All-SEC first team and All-Defense team last season, ranked second in the league in rebounding (he set Arkansas’ single-season record) and fourth nationally in defensive win shares. He had 16 double-doubles, including one in each of Arkansas’ four games during an Elite Eight run in the NCAA Tournament. The most endearing thing about Williams is that he knows exactly what he is — and isn’t.
“I would say that I’m not the most athletic person. That’s not how my game is played. I’m not going to be the guy who goes and does a flashy dunk or has my head up at the rim blocking a shot,” Williams told NCAA.com’s Andy Katz. He “humbly” compares himself to Al Horford. “He’s always been a dirty work player. He does a lot of fundamentals, plays hard, gets rebounds. He doesn’t have the most exciting game to watch, but he always plays good. He just does his role and does it great.”
(Photo: Kelley L Cox / USA Today)
Kyle Tucker is a staff writer for The Athletic, covering Kentucky college basketball and the Tennessee Titans. Before joining The Athletic, he covered Kentucky for seven years at The (Louisville) Courier-Journal and SEC Country. Previously, he covered Virginia Tech football for seven years at The (Norfolk) Virginian-Pilot. Follow Kyle on Twitter @KyleTucker_ATH
