Thirty-seven regular season games into his NBA career, Zion Williamson has mostly defied player comparisons, but in late December, Phoenix head coach Monty Williams likened the 20-year-old to a physically dominant power forward from the 1990s.
“Zion is just an unbelievable force,” the former New Orleans sideline leader said. “I don’t know any other way to describe it. He reminds me so much of Charles Barkley, a guy (with) that size who is dynamic and that strong, able to jump over bigger guys, overpower smaller guys. He seems to just go where he wants to go.”
Although there may be similarities to “Sir Charles,” even the Hall of Fame player-turned-TNT-analyst never produced a stretch as effective and efficient as Williamson’s recent string of performances. Seemingly on a nightly basis during New Orleans’ current Western Conference road trip, the 6-foot-7 Duke University product has achieved some rare statistical feats, scoring 90 points over the past three games, despite only taking 48 shots from the field. Williamson was a highlight machine Sunday at Sacramento en route to shooting 13/15 and scoring 31 points, then went for 32 on 14/19 accuracy against Utah. In Thursday’s rematch with the Jazz, he again showed no hesitation in driving directly into and over two-time NBA Defensive Player of the Year Rudy Gobert, scoring 27 points on 9/14 shooting. Add it up, and the second-year pro has shot 75 percent over the three-game span, missing only 12 of those 48 attempts.
“Zion is a great attacker and can really finish around the basket,” Pelicans head coach Stan Van Gundy said prior to Thursday’s game. “We know he’s really special in that way.”
Speaking of special, Williamson’s week has sent NBA analysts and statisticians scrambling to try to determine exactly how unique his offensive accomplishments have been. Here’s a sampling of some of the findings:
Per Elias Sports Bureau, he’s the youngest player in NBA history to notch consecutive games of 30-plus points on 70-plus percent shooting.
At an age of 20 years, 197 days, Williamson’s Tuesday game at Utah gave him that accomplishment. He’s actually the most likely player of any age this season to post this combination of numbers, because among the league’s top 40 scorers, he’s the only one shooting over 58 percent from the field. From that top-40 group, the only bigs within shouting distance of Williamson’s 59.4 percent are Denver’s Nikola Jokic (57.3) and Indiana’s Domantas Sabonis (55.5).
Along similar lines, he’s leading the NBA this season in field goals from the restricted area, with 99.
Williamson’s combination of physicality, agility and leaping ability often allows him to get all the way to the rim, even in halfcourt situations. That’s generating a (somewhat expected) steady stream of dunks. He has 26 dunks in his 13 games, which is a similar rate to his rookie campaign, when he threw down 58 slams in 24 contests.
He was the first NBA player since Allen Iverson in 1996-97 to score 750 points in fewer than 35 career games.
Sometimes it’s easy to forget that Williamson still has not played the equivalent of half of a conventional 82-game regular season. He now has racked up 848 points in 37 career games, including six games of 30-plus points. Incidentally, during Iverson’s rookie season with Philadelphia, he scored 30-plus points 20 times, with four of those games coming on 60 percent or better shooting from the field.
He’s heating up. Williamson is tied for third in the NBA in points scored over his last three games (90), trailing only two perennial All-Stars.
Brooklyn’s Kevin Durant (110) and Portland’s Damian Lillard (93) are the league’s only players who’ve poured in more points than Williamson over their three most recent games.
His 29 games of 20-plus points is tied with Shaquille O’Neal for third-most since the NBA-ABA merger in 1976-77 for any player in the first 40 games of a career.
Via ESPN, this statistic means Williamson still has three more chances to add to his first-40-games total, in upcoming games on the schedule vs. Minnesota, San Antonio and Washington. Stay tuned.