The NBA Draft took place a couple of weeks ago, and most pundits have spent their time analyzing who got picked and which teams made out the best. But as a UC Santa Barbara Gaucho alum, the aspect of the draft that I’ve been thinking about the most is: How did UCSB star Alan Williams NOT get drafted?!?!
Williams led college basketball in rebounding for two straight years. He entered the season with a large spread in Sports Illustrated that declared him “The Beast of the Beach.” He regularly was featured in columns describing him as “the best college basketball player you’ve never heard of” or some such moniker. An ill-timed shoulder injury forced Williams out of the lineup for a few weeks, which probably cost him a second straight Big West Player of the Year Award. Still, he was the best player on the floor in just about every game in which he played.
Williams graduated as one of the best (if not THE best) player in UCSB Gaucho history. So how in the world did his stock fall so far that he was forced to try and play his way onto the Houston Rockets as a free agent? It all comes down to one factor: UCSB head coach Bob Williams and his terrible, terrible offensive system, which hampered Alan’s development while simultaneously reigning in his stats.
For many (many) years, my fellow Gaucho alum Matt and I have been attending UCSB games whenever they play in the greater Los Angeles area. And for many (many) years, we have been watching Williams shoehorn his players into the same tired motion sets. How many hundreds of Gaucho possessions have we watched in horror as the players rotated the ball back and forth around the perimeter, never really even looking to pass the ball inside or shoot, only to wind up with a hurried, frantic brick tossed up by whoever has the ball in his hands when the shot clock winds down?
Williams has had the Gauchos running the same paint-by-numbers offense for the entirety of his UCSB career. If someone had the time and patience to do so, he or she could sit down and watch a recording of a 1999 Gaucho game back-to-back with one from last season. This poor unfortunate would recognize that nothing’s changed in Williams’ one-note offense—only the numbers on the players’ jerseys. And maybe the frustrated looks on the crowd’s faces.
For over a decade, Matt and I have dubbed Williams’ clueless offense The System. It started as a morbid joke, as we watched a series of more-or-less talented players forced to constrict or conform their games to Williams’ endless series of poorly-set screens and ball reversals. What began as a joke, though, soon began to inform every game we watched together.
Why would a team featuring the explosive scoring potential of Orlando Johnson and James Nunnally ignore their talents and continue to play in the same style as Gaucho teams that struggled to find scorers? Most importantly to this essay, Why would a team with the undeniable low-post power of Alan Williams spend their time on offense setting half-baked screens and flitting around the outside of the 3-point line? Why, in Alan Williams’ fourth year in the program, had Coach Williams completely failed to teach any member of his team how and when to throw an effective entry pass to the post?
The answer is The System. Williams simply does not know how to adapt his style to fit the players in his program. When you have an undersized, undermanned squad that features just a handful of outside shooters, it makes sense to run defenders through screens to try and open up long-range shots. It makes much less sense when you have a swingman who can create his own shot at will (Orlando Johnson) or a wide-body power forward who dominates the low blocks (Alan Williams). Yet, every Gaucho team that Williams has coached plays in the exact same style. Rotate the ball, pretend to look inside, rotate the ball, fake penetration, rotate the ball, jack up a bad shot.
To compound the misery of The System, Coach Williams feels the need to control the offensive flow of the game to the point that he seemingly calls designed “plays” on just about every possession. A couple of years ago, I was at a UCSB-Long Beach State game at the Pyramid. Long Beach’s Saturday afternoon crowd was pretty sparse, so at halftime my buddy and I wandered down and filled two of the seats right behind the Gaucho bench. What we witnessed was both eye-opening and horrifying (if you’re a Gaucho fan).
Coach Williams had a crib sheet tucked inside his palm, which he frequently glanced down at to decide which “play” to call. Twenty years on the bench and he still can’t remember which play is which? Worse, from our vantage point it was clear that the Gaucho players were so concerned with what play they were running that they were constantly looking at the coach during game action. Players could hardly keep their focus on what was going on in front of them, because they were always looking to Coach Williams to see what they were supposed to be doing. The resulting offensive “flow” can be guessed at.
How does all this apply to Alan Williams? Well, if Coach Williams had been able to devise a way to get the ball to his superstar in positions from which he could score and/or pass, Alan’s stats would have been through the roof. His incredible rebounding numbers could have easily been supplemented by 30 points and a handful of assists per game.
Doubt it? As a junior, Williams averaged over 21 a night on just 15 shots. If he’s getting 20+ shots per game and anchoring your offense, he’s also going to get a few more free throws every night. In a semi-modern offense that actually made the most of his skill set, Williams would surely average 30 points. And I’m telling you, I don’t care WHAT conference you’re from, if you put up 30 and 12 a game, someone’s going to draft you. When it comes to making an NBA team, there’s a big difference between being a draft pick with a contract in his pocket and a guy on a summer league team trying to get noticed.
As it is, as a senior Williams shot only 13 times a game in Coach Williams’ slow-down System. Alan spent large parts of games in great post position, waving his arms in vain for an entry pass that would never come. He still put up a decent 17 pt, 12 reb nightly average as the Gauchos meandered their way to a 19-14 record and a first-round exit in something called the CBI.
Coach Bob Williams is clearly a decent recruiter, but it’s long past time to acknowledge that his tiresome offensive System holds back any player of above-average talent. He seems to think he’s coaching Hoosiers, but the likes of Alan Williams and Orlando Johnson shouldn’t be running the Picket Fence. It’s one thing for the team to sputter to endless .500 records, because clearly that’s good enough for the UCSB administration. But when your craptastic offense actually ends up hurting the career prospects of the kids in it, you might want to rethink things.
Or at least teach your point guards how to throw entry passes.
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