Zion Williamson's brilliance and struggles continue to captivate fans, creating a paradox of a player who is both immensely talented and plagued by inconsistency. This article explores the conflicting narratives surrounding Williamson, examining his impact on the court, his off-court persona, and the public's complex relationship with him.
Tuesday night, I saw my Chicago Bulls live. I was joined by a friend who rooted for the opposing team, the New Orleans Pelicans . Although our fandoms were different on this night, both of us are constantly fascinated and tortured by the Pelicans’ star player, Zion Williamson . He was the reason we showed up.
Had Williamson not recently returned from injury, and then from a one-game suspension—because he was, when the team plane was leaving, not present—we probably wouldn’t have bothered to show up. The tickets were cheap, as they tend to be during the post-holiday lull, on a weeknight, with wind-adjusted temperatures down near zero degrees. So it didn’t take a lot, from Zion, for us to feel like we’d spent our thirty-five dollars wisely. Despite playing on a load restriction and clocking in at just 24 minutes, he generally controlled the game. With his ridiculous, overwhelming physicality, every Zion drive, screen, and box-out is a planetary thing. He rarely self-propels and wows like he used to regularly do, as a younger player, but his knowledge of his own gravity has refined significantly, such that the 24-year-old now often plays more like Boris Diaw than LeBron James. When the Bulls tried to overload Williamson, during the game—a 119-113 New Orleans victory—he flung the ball to open shooters, to the tune of nine assists. When they covered him one-on-one, usually with the perpetually over-burdened Patrick Williams, Zion turned his body into the clean spaces it always creates, and lofted the ball feathery into the basket, notching nearly a point per minute. “That’s a grown man,” I said to my friend as he paced through the motions of his effortless power game, but then I had to correct myself; “no, actually: that’s a very big boy.” Such is the paradox of Zion. He is simultaneously a young person, approaching the latter half of his twenties, who often acts like a rebellious teen and, on the court, the image of old-man brawn, gently obliterating fellow pros as if they’re his children on his driveway court (the older among us will recognize this style from the works of the similarly wide and dexterous Moses Malone). Everyone who follows basketball is aware of Zion’s injuries and maturity issues; these are, in fact, the central facts of his cultural existence. But imagine watching 2025 Zion with an uninformed fan, and having to explain that this savvy operator, deftly manipulating and muscling through so many strategic riddles, is the same person as the one inAbout that Wendy’s picture: it is fake, but it is also hilarious. Even those sports fans who are perpetually vexed by matters of honor and duty—and relatedly peeved by Zion, at all times—must chuckle a bit when they see him hanging out of his car, grinning with genuine delight in a bucket hat and hoop earrings as he neglects his professional calling to wait for his nuggets and fries instead. Though it’s not what really happened, it has come to represent a convenient, and at least partially true, image of Williamson. His gleeful pose—which, to be sure, is the real part of that crude photoshop job—is further contextualized by the terms of his contract. Williamson has already missed 33 games this season due to his recurring hamstring issues, which means he is. New Orleans’ front office, weary of their gigantically fragile star’s ups and downs, built games-played and body-weight clauses into his five-year contract, to limit their commitment in the usually inevitable event of his absence. These carve-outs are highly unusual for a maximum-contract player in the contemporary NBA. The uniquely conditional contract is appropriate, though, if seen as an expression of the broader basketball world’s feelings about Zion. Though he appears happy enough with his life at a level of wealth, fame, and fun that most will never know, the world considers his existence a dream sourly deferred. And for that, they want to punish him. Today, performances of disgust with Williamson have likely been heard and seen at greater volume than his actual games played as a Pelican have been observed. When available, he impacts the game like almost no one else, but for the culture, there’s no closing the gap between what he is and what he was supposed to be. Perhaps Zion can make it work in New Orleans, one day, or find himself thriving in the forecasted historic ways for a different franchise. But for now, his place in the sport’s mythology is that of Schrödinger’s Prospect: he is at once one of the most visibly under-seasoned souls in the league and one of its most beleaguered. Young and flawed, but also old and known. The energy seen from so many Williamson critics shows us that the clash of his biographical chapters—great hope, then bitter disappointment—has yet to resolve into a person more realized and understood. If he can stay on the floor for the rest of the season, perhaps he can more become someone who we don't already have a storyline fo
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