Jalen Williams had some excellent performances in the NBA Finals, and he later revealed that he was battling the same injury that once plagued Kobe Bryant.
Shai Gilgeous-Alexander may have been the best player on the Oklahoma City Thunder, but there’s an argument to be made that they could not have won the NBA Finals without Jalen Williams.
In his first All-NBA season, Williams posted 21.6 points, 5.3 rebounds, and 5.1 assists. In Game 5 of the Finals, he scored 40 points and finished with averages of 23.6 points. During the entire season and postseason, he was a reliable second option for the Thunder.
However, he would later reveal that he spent the entire postseason suffering from a torn scapholunate ligament in his wrist, preventing him from truly being at his best.
Jalen Williams tore his wrist on April 9
Three games from the end of the regular season, Williams and Devin Booker got tangled up, resulting in Williams tearing ligaments in his wrist, something he said he could “hear” as it happened.
He would go on to miss the final two games, but by then the Thunder had clinched the first seed in the Western Conference. He did not miss a single game in the postseason, even if he was tempted to sit out, as a torn ligament can often take a month or more to recover from.
“I just remember like pulling my hand out of the mix,” he reflected.
“It was like a couple of people involved in the jump ball. I remember pulling my hand out of the mix, bro. And like I just, I kind of heard like, almost like a paper ripping noise.”
Williams would go on to take aspirin, cortisone, and lidocaine to deal with the pain, and he played through it, being one of the best players in the league in the postseason.
Kobe Bryant had the same injury
In the preseason before the 2011-2010 season, Kobe Bryant tore his lunotriquetral ligament, which is pretty similar to Williams’ injury.
Bryant ended up taking injections and played in the first 56 games of the lockout-shortened 2011-12 NBA season, leading the Los Angeles Lakers to the playoffs, where they lost to the Thunder in the second round.
That campaign was one of the last great seasons for Bryant. He came fourth in MVP voting and led the league in field goal attempts while scoring 27.9 points per game, the sixth-most of his career.
“They were telling me, and I don’t want to make this like a Kobe thing, but that was one of the people that they had brought up that had done it before and played through it,” Williams said. “So they were saying it was doable.”
Much like Bryant, Williams was unwilling to sit out and watch his team play without him. Unlike Bryant, the Thunder were able to get the job done and hoist the Larry O’Brien Trophy.
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