Now the joooooy of my woooorld is in ZIIIIION — thread for Zion Williamson

I went looking for receipts and found an opinion of mine so wrong I'm shook.

link?

i think he was expected to make insane wow splash plays on defense, blocks where he comes from out of nowhere and skies above the backboard and shit. which he did regularly at duke and has not done basically at all in the NBA. but i’m not sure ppl saw him as like a potential elite lockdown defender tho i could be misremembering

i'm sure there was some wishful thinking about his defense at the time given his ceiling as an athlete, but his body type is not one of a plus defender

I went looking for receipts and found an opinion of mine so wrong I'm shook.

― il lavoro mi rovina la giornata (PBKR), Wednesday, February 21, 2024 7:33 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

link?

― lag∞n, Wednesday, February 21, 2024 7:35 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

I might have said Simmons > Embiid. Dark times.

(hundreds of thousands of years hence, faint tremors of PBKR's opinion arrive at an advanced civilization on a far off planet sparking a global wave of madness, riots, and rapid social disintegration)

lol oh no

when keeping receipts goes wrong

in another era (and with another mentality) could have imagined zion scraping being an impact defender in the model of say charles oakley. bruiser making the paint inhospitable. but pretty clearly neither he nor nba basketball are wired that way anymore

his block and steals rates were through the roof in college, didnt really take much interest in all that in the pros tho

Yeah pretty sure people thought he’d be a menace as a help defender

i saw a full zion game last night --

i thought he looked slimmed down and pretty athletic. there were 2 or 3 times where he just jumped much higher than anyone else on the floor -- one for a block that was ruled a goaltend, another on a rebound. i think the thing is you just don't feel that athleticism throughout the game the way that you did w/ idk vintage blake griffin or something. and if you watch the duke highlights that's the kinda thing you start to picture. but he still has a lot of quickness and leaping ability relatively speaking. he got iso'd on jimmy a few times and was pretty easily able to use quickness off the dribble to get to his spot and then his elevation to just sky up and over for the shot. he had more trouble w/ bam tho who can slide his feet and jump w/ zion. the interesting thing is that for as good as he is in the paint he doesn't really dunk the ball -- he's outside the top 30 in the league in total dunks. you see him use the rapidness of his leaping ability to get floaters and other sorta hook shot, post move-y type looks in the paint.

the pels were also w/o ingram and mccollum got hurt in the second half -- the pels played the last like 6-8 mins of the game w/ zion out there w/ herb jones, trey murphy, jordan hawkins & nance, which is a sensible line up on paper: zion + a big + wing role players. but the pelicans literally could not score, i think they scored like 4 points in that stretch before garbage time. the heat were throwing zone at them and have been playing great defense lately in general, idk if those 5 guys have ever played together so i don't want to overstate it, but i do think point zion prob has a lot of strides to make w/ the actual "point" part

Yah the thing w Zion is he could be the most violent player in the league but he’s really a finesse player at his core

That Naji steal and alley 🤌 pic.twitter.com/MVrasSnAoZ

— New Orleans Pelicans (@PelicansNBA) March 20, 2024

zion is back baby

why does whichever zeller that is look like a newborn baby

Is our sweet boy really back? I remain skeptical

dont want to jinx anything but he seems back

when i saw that video earlier i truly had to double check the date

Yeah pretty sure people thought he’d be a menace as a help defender

― infinite wiggles (Spottie), Wednesday, February 21, 2024 9:16 PM (one month ago) bookmarkflaglink

eyes emoji

pic.twitter.com/H8D92RNPTK

— Rob Perez (@WorldWideWob) April 8, 2024

So proud of him.

Crazy but true: Last night was Zion’s first time making multiple 2-point jumpers outside 10 feet in the same game, per Second Spectrum tracking data.

It’s a shot he works on in practice all the time. Using it more in games will help when teams pack the paint against Pels’ O. pic.twitter.com/c3LmQjfoum

— Andrew Lopez (@_Andrew_Lopez) April 8, 2024

he went off last night mega clutch performance for our guy

both those jumpers theres four defenders in the paint my lord