JellyRolling wrote:Please do I would love to hear stories about him along with other Suns fans.
Well, one thing that you should know is that when Williams became a free agent after the 1997 season, he had multiyear offers from other clubs. A month away from turning thirty-five, the prudent economic decision would have been to take one of those multiyear offers. Instead, Williams returned to Phoenix on a one-year contract, saying that he enjoyed playing with Jason Kidd and Kevin Johnson. He was that kind of guy.
His life story proved unbelievable. Williams was born in rural Louisiana, in a time and place where Jim Crow segregation and the Ku Klux Klan remained very much entrenched. When he was an eight-month old baby, his mother died and his father left him with his son's maternal grandfather, an elderly blind man named Felton Williams. Baby Hot Rod's father said that he would return shortly, but he never did. A few days later, the next-door neighbor, a young divorcee named Barbara Colar, who had three kids of her own, found baby Hot Rod crying on Felton Williams' front porch and took him in, becoming his new mother.
As Hot Rod was growing up, Colar worked as a school janitor from six in the morning until three in the afternoon, then came home for an hour, and then headed to her second job as a cook at a steak-and-seafood restaurant, not returning again until midnight. Thus she managed to single-handedly support her four kids—her three biological daughters plus Hot Rod—while they all lived in a fourteen-by-sixty-foot trailer.
Like Kevin Johnson (or Michael Jordan, for that matter), Williams' original favorite sport was baseball, but a high school growth spurt turned him into an elite basketball prospect and sent him to Tulane University in New Orleans. There, he became wrapped up in a point-shaving scandal, resulting in an arrest, charges, and a possible seventeen-year prison sentence. With his impoverished background, Hot Rod acknowledged taking cash payments from whoever dumped the money in his lap, but he vociferously denied the charge that he had tanked games. The statistics and game film supported his case, and a jury eventually found him innocent.
The Cavaliers drafted him in the second round in 1985 and paid his legal bills while he spent a year in the United States Basketball League until being cleared of his charges. In Cleveland, he became the kind of player appreciated by crusty gym scouts—and who would now be appreciated by devotees of Real Plus-Minus. An excellent defender at multiple positions (he could guard centers, power forwards, small forwards, and even shooting guards on switches or cross-matches) and a selfless teammate who set good screens and contributed points, rebounds, and blocked shots, Williams became a vital component of perennial playoff clubs in Cleveland. As his head coach, Lenny Wilkens, stated, "Hot Rod knows where everyone is supposed to be on every play." As a restricted free agent in the summer of 1990, coming off a season where he had averaged 16.8 points, 8.1 rebounds, 2.0 blocks shots, 2.0 assists, and a .493 field goal percentage, the twenty-eight-year old Williams saw the Miami Heat, a third-year expansion franchise desperate to make a splash, offer him an outlandish contract for those days: $26.5M over seven years, including $5M in the first year, twice what Michael Jordan would earn in the upcoming season.
Cleveland thought highly enough of Williams to match the offer. He had gone from frightful poverty in rural Louisiana to receiving the second-largest contract in North American team sports history at that time, behind only Jose Canseco. Williams also fathered four children with his wife and gave all of them a variation of his own first name—John—to cement the bond that his own father had broken with him. And he used his interest in mathematics to become a carpenter who could read engineering blueprints, allowing him to build multiple churches in his native Louisiana.
Money and familial stability obviously did not end Williams' adversity, however. He was involved in a car accident in Cleveland in the summer of 1995, and the Cavaliers traded him to Phoenix a few weeks later. After the accident, Williams had mostly complained about his back, which the Suns found to be structurally sound and which resolved itself soon enough. But the actual damage turned out to be far more extensive. Nerve irritation imperiled his right knee and leg, and a piece of metal was embedded in his foot and would not be discovered until the fall of 1996, costing Williams the first 12 games of the following season. Hobbled by the effects of the car accident for the first four-plus months of the '95-'96 season in Phoenix, Williams missed a number of games and struggled with his mobility and effectiveness when he was on the floor. The result, combined with nostalgia for Dan Majerle (the player shipped to Cleveland in exchange for Williams), was that many media members and fans (and bloggers who straddle the fence of that ignorant contingent) still, to this day, ridicule Hot Rod as a "bust" or a "stiff," as some "joke" who wrecked the Suns.
The truth of the matter was very different. Not only was the withering criticism totally unjustified in the sense that Williams' initial poor play in Phoenix stemmed from injuries that had resulted from extenuating circumstances, but it obscured the reality that Hot Rod rehabilitated himself diligently and bounced back to make very solid contributions to the Suns. (I actually believe that the trade turned out to be a good one for Phoenix, which is a topic for another time.) Over his last 17 regular season games of the '95-'96 season, Williams averaged 10.9 points, 8.9 rebounds, and 2.6 blocked shots, shooting .511 from the field and .792 from the free throw line (good for a .566 True Shooting Percentage, not to mention more assists than turnovers). In one game, a home win over the Warriors on March 21, 1996, Williams nearly recorded a triple-double with blocks, posting 10 points, 9 rebounds, and 9 blocks.
http://www.basketballreference.com/teams/boxscore.htm?yr=1995&b=19960321&tm=PHO Over the previous two games, he had averaged 19.0 points, 10.5 rebounds, 3.5 blocks, 2.5 assists, a .696 field goal percentage, and a .750 free throw percentage.
http://www.basketballreference.com/teams/boxscore.htm?yr=1995&b=19960315&tm=PHIhttp://www.basketballreference.com/teams/boxscore.htm?yr=1995&b=19960317&tm=CHALater, on April 5 in Seattle, he produced another 20-10 game with multiple blocks.
http://www.basketballreference.com/teams/boxscore.htm?yr=1995&b=19960405&tm=SEAOnce he got healthy, Hot Rod gave the Suns one of the best packages of abilities that they have had at center. He was long and mobile; he possessed very quick hands; he could leap quickly; he could defend the pick-and-roll, protect the rim, and muscle up in the post; and he competed with real grit and focus defensively. A legitimate 6'10" (6'11" with his flat-top fade), Williams would constantly sink into a great defensive crouch, waving his arms and wielding his hands like a cyclops. Offensively, he set excellent screens and could roll or slash to the basket, finish with some athleticism and nimbleness at the hoop, and occasionally stroke open jump-shots with range out to nineteen feet, rendering him viable as a pick-and-pop option. He would set a lot of high screens in the middle of the floor, above the top of the key, for Kevin Johnson. Often times, Hot Rod would use his quickness to rush out from the paint before setting the high screen, catching K.J.'s defender off-guard. Since Williams did not represent a major offensive player by the time that he was in Phoenix, K.J. would usually use the Williams screens to explode to the basket and finish, draw a foul, or collapse the defense and find someone else. If a scorer such as Charles Barkley, Wayman Tisdale, or Danny Manning, conversely, was setting the screen, K.J. frequently would be looking to set up the screener with an assist. But Williams would occasionally constitute a scoring option after setting the screen, especially if he found himself in good space for his pick-and-pop jumper.
How valuable could Williams be to the Suns? In '96-'97, Phoenix went 40-28 (.588) in the 68 games that he played. In the 14 games that he missed, the Suns went 0-14 (.000). Of course, Kevin Johnson also missed the first 11 of those games, and Mark Bryant (Phoenix's second-best defensive big man) missed 13 of them, but Williams' defense proved critical. In the two games that he missed after the All-Star break that year, the Suns just could not generate enough stops against Western Conference playoff teams.
http://www.basketballreference.com/teams/boxscore.htm?yr=1996&b=19970211&tm=PORhttp://www.basketballreference.com/teams/boxscore.htm?yr=1996&b=19970415&tm=PHOConversely, when he was in the lineup, Williams constituted the Suns' defensive fulcrum. As Cotton Fitzsimmons—who had coached in the NBA since the early 1970s—stated late in the previous season, "He's the best player I've coached at playing defense inside." Williams' presence allowed new head coach Danny Ainge to play three and even four guards—or three guards and a small forward— simultaneously for long durations (eventually almost the entire game) down the stretch of the 1997 season, prefiguring Mike D'Antoni and the offenses of today. Williams could also play "shutdown" individual defense. In a game against the Rockets on April 2, 1997, Phoenix placed Williams on Charles Barkley, and he held Sir Charles to 6 points on 2-16 field goal shooting. Meanwhile, Hot Rod contributed 16 points on 6-10 field goal shooting, 16 rebounds, 3 assists, and 2 blocks.
http://www.basketballreference.com/teams/boxscore.htm?yr=1996&b=19970402&tm=PHODespite starting the season slowly due to the procedure that removed the metal embedded in his foot, Williams led the Suns in rebounds per game that year with a career-high 8.3. Over his final 25 regular season games that year, he averaged 10.4 points, 9.9 rebounds, and 1.9 blocked shots, shooting .596 from the field. Phoenix went 20-5 in those games, recovering from their disastrous 0-13 start to reach the playoffs.
As I noted earlier, Hot Rod re-signed with the Suns in July 1997, but he played fewer minutes the following season after Phoenix acquired Clifford Robinson and Antonio McDyess to create a deep front-court. Still, Williams helped the Suns rank sixth in Defensive Rating (points allowed per possession) in '97-'98, their highest ranking in eight years, as the team won 56 games. In the last minute of this video compilation, one can see clips of Williams from his final season in Phoenix:
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJHzwl9nI04[/youtube]
Included are clips of Hot Rod scoring off pick-and-rolls with Steve Nash and Kevin Johnson and of him rejecting Tim Duncan twice on one play—good stuff.
He was an extremely unselfish player, always committed to defense and the little things that allowed a team to function as a collective unit on the court. Since he focused on glue, rather than glamour, and since he was never a self-promoter, many media members and fans totally overlooked or dismissed him.
Williams completed his NBA career in Dallas in 1999, playing with a number of his former Phoenix teammates: A.C. Green, Michael Finley, Cedric Ceballos, and Steve Nash. He accomplished a lot in his life, both as an athlete and a man, especially considering the no-chance circumstances in which his life began. That life should have lasted much longer, but he had already beaten the odds enormously.
Sadly, two members of the Suns' '95-'96 front-court (the other being Tisdale) have now passed away due to cancer.
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