The Boston Celtics utilized the No. 46 pick in this year’s NBA Draft on Amari Williams. The Nottingham, England, native spent the first four years of his collegiate career at Drexel before taking his talents to the University of Kentucky.
Wildcats head coach Mark Pope couldn’t wait to insert the seven-foot center with a pterodactyl-like seven-foot-five wingspan into his lineup to patrol the pivot.
Flashing a smile, Pope glowingly told Forbes of his initial assessment of Williams’ game upon arriving in Lexington, “We loved him. We loved his defensive prowess. His work on the glass was exceptional. His rim-protection capability was great. He’s the three-time Defensive Player of the Year [in the Coastal Athletic Association].
“So all those things. His athleticism and size, his physicality, were all really important to us. And then, the unique feature of him that fit us so well was his ability to pass the ball. Elite level passer, elite level playmaker, has the personality and the desire to be a great, great passing big, and he certainly proved to be that.”
Williams’s facilitating capabilities have already been on display at Summer League.
On the heels of getting drafted, he joined the rest of the Celtics’ draft class, Hugo Gonzalez and Max Shulga, in helping conduct a youth basketball clinic at a renovated court unveiling at a YMCA in the greater Boston Area.
There, he shared the combination that cultivated his playmaking prowess.
“A lot of people are saying [that]
by playing soccer growing up, that was my first sport, and [by] not hitting a growth spurt until late,” said Williams. “I feel like those two things helped my skill set, and something that’s helped me get to this level.”
As for what his passing and the ability to play through him unlocked for Coach Pope’s offense, he conveyed how crucial it was for the Wildcats to have someone of his talent in that role.
“Well, that’s the way we play,” said Pope. “We’re very much a point-center organization. We’ll turn the game inside-out and we love to have our bigs be decision makers, whether it’s in a five-out offense, whether it’s in a trail kind of into a flow zoom offense, whether it’s having them be the playmaker out of a short roll or the Bull’s head post or we put the ball in our five man’s hands so that he could be a playmaker. And Amari allowed us to do all of those things.”
When it mattered most, Kentucky leaned on Williams
“He was such an elite-level guy,” voiced Pope. “In fact, he saved us. We spent the last two months of the season without our starting point guard, our backup point guard, and our third-string point guard, who was our starting two. We lost all of them. And so Amari had this massive burden of kind of righting the ship. We saved ourselves by putting the ball in his hands.
“He was breaking the press off the bounce. He was leading the break off the bounce. We could use him as a pressure release to get the ball out of somebody else’s hands early in a possession, so we could be settled with him starting the play. I can’t overstate the importance of the impact that he had on our season.”
That ability to grab a rebound and push the ball up the floor, or initiate a transition attack, matters more than ever. The game now operates at a breakneck pace. Williams’s new team, the Celtics, is determined to play at a faster tempo with greater regularity.
