Some human bodies are not meant to endure a full 82-game NBA regular season. It's not necessarily the marker of doom it may seem. Bill Walton never could, and he won an MVP award, a Finals MVP award, two titles, and made the Hall of Fame. Tracy McGrady, a fellow Hall-of-Famer, never suited up for 82 games in any of his 16 NBA seasons. Joel Embiid, with two scoring titles and an MVP under his belt at age 30, hasn't yet managed it, and almost certainly never will. You can be a great player without ever exactly being an every-night player. Zion Williamson can still be great.
That's the thing I keep repeating to myself, in the manner of one who recites comforting air-travel safety statistics immediately after having watched both of his plane's wings shear off at 39,000 feet, when I read that Williamson's latest leg injury has not responded as hoped to "multiple treatments" and that he is "not close to a return to action." Williamson started the season with a sore left leg, and then on Nov. 6 he tweaked his hamstring. He returned on Nov. 9 and played well in a loss. Williamson says he "felt fine" after this game, but during treatment the next day he felt "more sore here than usual," and was told after a checkup that he'd suffered a strain and would be ruled out indefinitely. It's been two weeks, and now someone wants Shams to spread the word that fans should not expect Zion to return to the court anytime soon, despite several different attempts having been made at healing that hamstring.
Williamson has played in just 190 of 407 Pelicans games spread across six NBA regular seasons. Already there are signs of a possible loss of some of his otherworldly athleticism: His efficiency has dipped on shots from inside the restricted arc, from a God-like 69 percent in 2022-23 on a league-leading 12 attempts per game to a heartbreakingly Simone Fontecchio–like 54 percent so far this season. Two years ago Zion completed 42 dunks in 29 games, throwing it down on more than 10 percent of his total shot attempts; last season he had 78 in 70; this season he has seven dunks in six games, or about .077 of his shot attempts, and four of those came in one game. His overall scoring efficiency has taken a resulting tumble, and the Pelicans have not been a lock to win his minutes. He's not an entirely different player, but it's enough to worry that across just 190 games played—not even two-and-a-half seasons' worth of total games—Williamson's singular frame has already lost some of the explosive and gravity-defying gifts that very recently made every one of his appearances feel like appointment television.
Williamson was asked again last week whether he simply puts too much strain on his lower body by being as huge as he is while doing as much leaping and soaring as he likes to do. This was not as astoundingly nerdy as the time he was asked in a press conference whether he should dunk less in order to prolong his career, but the question gets at the same angst. And unlike last time, when Zion chuckled and then said, more or less, are you fucking kidding me, this time Zion acknowledged that he doesn't "have the normal basketball body type" and allowed that this is now a consideration during rehab, if not yet during a fast break.
I am bumming myself out, and so I will pause here to enjoy a Zion Williamson highlight video, from a game on Nov. 1 against the Indiana Pacers, when our cubical lad had a very brief spell of feeling good, and overwhelmed an NBA team:
At other points in head coach Willie Green's tenure the Pelicans have managed to stay afloat—or better—during Zion's various leg-related absences. The team this year has been far too crabbed across the board, with injuries to CJ McCollum, Trey Murphy, DeJounte Murray, Herb Jones, Jose Alvarado, and Jordan Hawkins all contributing to a putrid 4-13 start that has the Pelicans at the bottom of the Western Conference standings and in the dreaded Wizards zone, per Cleaning the Glass, in both offensive and defensive efficiency. Hard as it may be to believe, by the start of December the Pelicans will be a quarter of the way through the regular season, and staring up at a conference that goes at least 12 deep with teams that can reasonably hope to compete for a play-in or better. If, as Shams indicates, Williamson's absence extends to Christmas or beyond, New Orleans might already have completed the competitive portion of their season before their best player returns to his place of prominence.
The situation is becoming awkward. The Pelicans loaded Williamson's current max-level deal with incentives and ripcords, and Zion's injuries and absences across the 2022-23 season have already triggered a mechanism that removed the guarantees from the next three years of the contract. He can re-guarantee portions of the deal by hitting certain performance markers—among them "specific weigh-in checkpoints," per The Athletic—but in order to fully guarantee his salary for next season, Williamson would need to play at least 61 games this season and pass six weigh-ins along the way. Neither of those conditions seem very likely to be met, at present: Zion has already missed 11 games with an injury that will limit his ability to get a lot of aerobic exercise, and this is a player who has struggled to maintain an ideal playing weight even when his mobility hasn't been limited. In related news, on Friday Williamson fired his agent.
So this is all shaping up to be a great big bummer. Zion is now so infrequently an active participant in his sport that it's possible to completely forget about all the fun that's gone missing, for the fans and the team and the player. Zion Williamson can still be great, but time is becoming a factor.
