This is interesting from Chris Herring - DWill is notably worse from the right hand side of the court. And for the first three years of his career, he played with lefty PGs like Rubio and Isaiah Thomas who set up the action from the left side of the court - so maybe that contributed to him being on his weaker side - the right side more often?
Anyhow, I agree with Fish that DWill being misused on offense doesn't explain his bad defense, bad passing and poor rebounding. But it could be a factor that made him feel uncomfortable and out of place. Combine that with the pressure of being a no.2 overall pick and expected to put up numbers on a team he didn't like... it's possible he could have struggled for those reasons. Of course, the best guys play through it and put up numbers wherever. But DWill is maybe not a "best guy"... he may have been misused. Plenty of guys around the league take a few stops to figure it out, from Chauncey Billups to Jermaine O'Neal, etc. Not saying DWill is one of those guys, but I'm saying I'm willing to give him a chance.
Five years into his NBA career, it remains unclear what sort of player Derrick Williams will become.On some nights, the enigmatic 6-foot-8-inch forward, who has posted a team-high 44 points in the Knicks’ last two preseason games, flashes the kind of highflying scoring ability that made him the No. 2 overall pick in the 2011 NBA Draft. On others, he doesn’t score at all, and struggles to find his way defensively. Last season, for example, he scored 15 points or more 12 times, but scored two points or fewer 14 times.
Williams, now with his third NBA team in five seasons, spent 2014-15 in Sacramento, where he averaged a respectable 8.3 points in 19.8 minutes a game. But a look at his shot chart with the Kings highlights some serious inconsistencies. The most baffling: He was one of the NBA’s best players at finishing near the rim with his left hand, yet one of the worst at finishing near the rim from the right—despite being right-handed.
From inside of 5 feet, Williams shot a blistering 71% from the left side of the rim last season. On the right, though, he shot just over 40%, according to Stats, LLC. Of the 185 NBA guards and forwards who took at least 70 close-range shots from each side of the basket, no player had a greater disparity in accuracy from left to right than Williams.
Asked about the statistical oddity, Williams laughed, noting that he surprised himself earlier that night when he managed to sink a right-handed floater against the Washington Wizards. That’s how much more confident he is about shooting with his left hand than with his right.
He said that an injury to his right hand suffered during his sophomore season at Arizona—when he won Pac-10 Player of the Year honors—helps explain why he’s more comfortable with his off-hand. “I used my left hand a lot that year, and it’s gotten to a point where I might be better with that hand now.”
“I do pretty much everything with my left now—push the ball with that hand, finish better at the rim with that hand,” he said.
If that’s not strange enough, though, last season was the first in which Williams had a notable statistical difference in accuracy from one side of the rim to the other. So what explains the change?
One possibility: In his first three NBA seasons, spent with the Minnesota Timberwolves and Sacramento, Williams never played with a point guard who operated primarily from the right side of the floor. Before playing alongside the Kings’ Darren Collison in 2014, Williams played with point guards Isaiah Thomas, a lefty, and Ricky Rubio, who writes with his left hand, is left-eye dominant and generally prefers to start the Timberwolves’ offense from the left side of the court.
With that in mind, it’s possible that Williams struggled from the right side last season because he found Sacramento’s spacing to be relatively cramped there on the strong side of the court, as opposed to the left, where there was more space to work.
‘I do pretty much everything with my left now—push the ball with that hand, finish better at the rim with that hand.’
—Derrick Williams
Asked to explain the strange discrepancy that emerged last season, he drew a blank. Whatever the case, the Knicks have high hopes for Williams this season—the first of a two-year, $10-million contract, with a player option in year two. Williams, who has averaged 16.7 points in the team’s first three preseason games (second only to Carmelo Anthony’s 18.7), brings a level of athleticism and scoring punch off the bench that New York has lacked in recent years.
Coach Derek Fisher has suggested several times that Williams, who is 24, will benefit from having a more stable situation, with more veterans around him than he’s had with past teams. So far, Fisher has been impressed with the forward’s ability to score in bunches even without fully grasping the team’s triangle offense. (Williams himself acknowledged he only understands about 50% of it so far.)
“He’s just trusting his game and not thinking too much about what he’s doing,” said Fisher, Williams’s fifth coach in five seasons. “He was in the wrong places a lot of times, but it’s a results business, and he put the ball in the basket. He’ll figure it out in time.”
10/15/2015 11:58 AM