Ben Williams, who served as Brooklyn Nets Director of High Performance the past year, is out, returning to his old job with London’s Queens Park Rangers of the English Football League.
The news was first reported by West London Sport Wednesday and tweeted at NetsDaily by a Queens Park Rangers fan blog...
Multiple league sources confirmed that Williams left in April shortly after the end of the Nets season. There is no replacement yet named. Williams is the third high level performance team executive to leave Brooklyn in the last four years. Brian Meehan, who came to the Nets not long after Sean Marks was named GM in 2016, remains assistant director of high performance. He was seen with Marks last month in Los Angeles where Marks was scouting draft prospects.
Williams was in charge of “overseeing all aspects of the Nets’ performance team.” according to a Nets announcement of his hire last September.
He is returning to QPR in the English Football League Championship, the level just below the English Premier League in English soccer. There, he was seen as an innovator, He had previously worked in a number of other sports, including cycling and ocean (yacht) racing. He had no experience in basketball.
While working full time for the Nets on one side of the Atlantic, he remained a consultant with QPR. David McIntyre of West London Sport wrote Wednesday that the arrangement was controversial in London “in light of Rangers beingbeset by injuries last season.”