Jalen Williams has had some great performances in the NBA Finals and revealed that he is fighting the same injuries that plagued Kobe Bryant later.
Shy Gilgauss Alexander may have been the best player in the Oklahoma City Thunder, but there is arguing that he could not win the NBA Finals without Jalen Williams.
In his first All-NBA season, Williams recorded 21.6 points, 5.3 rebounds and 5.1 assists. In Game 5 of the final, he scored 40 points and averaged 23.6 points. During the entire season and the postseason, he was the second reliable option for the Thunder.
However, he will later reveal that he spent the entire postseason suffering from a cleft ligament in his wrist, making sure he didn’t really get to his best.
Three games since the end of the regular season, Williams and Devin Booker were intertwined, causing Williams to tear a ligament into his wrist.
He missed the final two games, but by then the Thunder had won his first species in the Western Conference. He didn’t miss one game in the postseason, as it often takes more than a month for the torn ligaments to recover.
“I remember pulling my hands out of the mix,” he recalled.
“It was like someone involved in jump balls, and I remember taking my hands out of the mix.
Williams continued to take aspirin, cortisone and lidocaine to deal with the pain, experiencing being one of the best players in the postseason league.
In the preseason 2011-2010 pre-season, Kobe Bryant tore a Leno Triquetral ligament, which was quite similar to Williams’ injury.
Bryant was eventually injected, playing in the first 56 games of the 2011-12 NBA season, when the lockout was shortened, leading the Los Angeles Lakers to the playoffs and losing to the Thunder in the second round.
That campaign was one of Bryant’s last great seasons. He came in fourth in the MVP poll, leading the league in field goal attempts, scoring 27.9 points per game, the sixth game of his career.
“They were telling me, and I don’t want this to be like Kobe, but it was one of the people they raised, and they’ve done it before and played through it,” Williams said. “So they said it was viable.”
Like Bryant, Williams didn’t want to go outside and see his team play without him. Unlike Bryant, Thunder got the job done and rolled up the Larry O’Brien Trophy.