The Phoenix Suns were going to be positioned this offseason to use their own assets proactively if they desired, and if they did, it was likely going to be the only significant move for a while.
Whether or not you realized it at the time, that was the Mark Williams trade.
Phoenix gave up two first-round picks for Williams, albeit weak ones — No. 29 this year and very likely somewhere in the 20s in 2029. Unless the Suns consider trading their rookies or Devin Booker anytime soon, they’re out of big trades to make. Phoenix has zero tradable first-rounders left (until future firsts in the 2030s become eligible) and one second-rounder.
And with Khaman Maluach easily being the most valuable asset coming back in the Kevin Durant trade, it makes Williams and Maluach the two most important Suns to watch this season and next. The fact that they play the same position and those complications that come with we won’t get into today.
This is more about what Williams has to do on the court to make this multi-layered gamble worthwhile.
Firstly, he has to stay on it.
Williams, 23, has missed 140 games in three years after getting selected 15th overall in the 2022 NBA Draft. To be 100% fair to the total, a small handful of those were DNPs early in his rookie year when he spent time in the G League, but outside of that, it’s been injury after injury. Step one is getting his total games played (109) ahead of that figure.
Williams infamously failed a physical after getting traded to the Los Angeles Lakers at the trade deadline in February, an ultra-telling red flag considering how desperate the Lakers were to add a competent center for Luka Doncic to play alongside.
Williams’ agent suggested that the failed trade was not strictly about the physical, which, erm, is a weird thing to say! ESPN’s Dave McMenamin reported it was “multiple issues.” Those issues did not even cover Williams’ back, the major ailment that kept him out of the final 62 games of the 2023-24 season.
He missed training camp last year due to a left foot injury that kept him out the first 20 games. That left foot, a sore left knee, a sore right thumb (not the left one that he had surgery on after his rookie year) and back spasms were the other issues on the injury report last season.
All of the following is irrelevant if he can’t stay healthy. Unfortunately, that matters more than his actual play until he proves otherwise.
Another barometer to monitor going forward is minutes. He’s reached 30-plus in just 32 of his 106 games and 35-plus only three times. Assuming he develops into a building block for either Phoenix or someone else, that team is going to want him to reach those two thresholds in the playoffs. It’s baby steps for staying healthy, and then it’s larger strides toward that level of dependability.
What can Mark Williams bring to the Phoenix Suns when he’s not injured?
OK, now let’s really dive into who Williams is on the court when he’s there.
He is someone Suns fans should really be excited about when considering some of the shortcomings from the position over the last handful of years.
Williams is a better offensive player than defensive player at this stage of his career. It is not what you would expect knowing his profile, with how simplistic the offense is and the heights he can reach on defense. That is the dynamic he will have to shift in order to become the player worth acquiring.
The obvious skill he brings at 7-foot-2 with a 7-foot-6 wingspan and good mobility is finishing.
Last year across 44 games, Williams racked up 109 dunks. That’s 2.5 per game, more than what the Suns center quartet of Jusuf Nurkic, Mason Plumlee, Oso Ighodaro and Nick Richards combined for last year (2.1).
Gone are the days of the awkward half-second when you watched a Phoenix big catch the ball underneath with space to score and they bizarrely do something else. Williams is just going to dunk that basketball now and be a present lob threat too.
Williams has shot 70% at the rim as a pro, per Cleaning the Glass. It is not an elite number, but it’s above average and what should be seen as expected for someone of his physical makeup.
He will go for some complex, herky-jerky type of lay-ins with the footwork and hand-eye coordination mix that pushes him past his limits. This is the ol’ gift and a curse situation, as Williams will tally up those misses trying to navigate tight windows. Watching some full games back, defining his touch as “solid” is fair and a good bar to leave it at.
Williams adds a few buckets every night from his work in transition and on the glass.
The straight-line speed for his size is Deandre Ayton-esque, as is reaching it quickly. When his team has numbers or he knows his matchup isn’t catching him, Williams will run and be there down the middle, waiting as the trailer. If the Suns do indeed play with pace, it will suit him.
This is one of the best offensive rebounders on the planet.
Williams’ offensive rebounding percentage has measured from great to outstanding in three years, and more simply, he’s at a strong 2.8 offensive rebounds a night in his career on just 23.7 minutes per game. He’d be closer to a 75% shooter at the basket if it weren’t for all the tip-in attempts that count just as much as an open dunk to his field goal percentage.
When it’s clear to Williams that he is not getting the ball anymore, whether it could have been a lob or a dump-off pass, he does not detach. Williams’ mind immediately shifts to holding his positioning right under the net and knowing he’s going to have a half-decent shot to grab a miss, or going in there for a shot at it if he’s not already there.
It is a good, natural trait to have.
Williams is very much a “Walking 15 and 10” type of player. Those two elements, plus the constant dives to the basket, will get him in double figures just about every night.
When he played 25-plus minutes in 56 games, Williams reached 15 points in just over half of those contests (29). That type of production will always hold value at a base level.
Just to check every box here in the evaluation, there is not much of a post-up game present, which is neither a good nor a bad thing. Tracking data is fairly wonky, but of it following post-up possessions, Williams didn’t even rank in the top-50 of the league last year and shot 41.7% on the 36 total attempts, per NBA Stats. It’s an area where fluidity and finesse don’t really synchronize enough for him to create good looks for himself.
With that said, there are two finesse elements of Williams’ game he put a clear effort into improving on and incorporating — passing and shooting floaters.
Both of these address his biggest challenge: the last 10 feet to the basket.
While life would be grand if Williams caught everything within 5 feet, the majority of passes to Williams while rolling are going to come around the dotted line in the key, where either his man or a help defender is waiting. From there, he’s either going to take a dribble and finish around the basket or try to get a shot off.
In his first two years, Williams took a total of 79 shots from 5-14 feet, with that total on a comparable amount of total minutes this past season jumping to 135. His accuracy hovered around just south of 40%, a blah rate of efficiency that has to get closer to 45% for the juice to be worth the squeeze. Perhaps that comes with time after his first real go at taking this amount of floaters.
Next up is learning how to get fouled and using a dribble to better threaten the defender and get closer to the basket.
Oftentimes in these spaces, Williams has only two plans in mind as soon as he catches it: 1) shooting a floater or 2) moving downhill and embracing contact with the defender before letting out a noise to inform the referee he has been fouled.
The latter is not so much out of control as it is too inconsistent to draw enough fouls. Sometimes a defender isn’t even fouling him, and his touch isn’t at that super-high level to consistently make those tough looks.
To bring up Ayton again, as much as he would spin away from contact, he did so with incredible fluidity and reliability to get to that hook shot with which he had phenomenal touch. Williams finding something similar or at least more trust in something off the dribble to be more efficient in that space would go a long way.
Some good examples of this he’s shown, as well as those aforementioned finishes through contact:
This was the most concerning part of the tape as far as a Suns fit, because Booker is the only ball-handler on the roster who will consistently set Williams up for success in these types of scenarios. The amount of times Charlotte’s Miles Bridges dropped a pocket pass to Williams as the wrong read — either too early or when the defense had already recovered — was frustrating to watch and also could be the type of run-back Williams has with Phoenix’s other playmakers.
Williams welcomes contact to get to the free-throw line. In his low usage, Williams gets there at a very good rate. And despite not being a jump shooter at all, Williams is a career 75.3% free-throw shooter, including 80.4% last season.
What about Mark Williams’ playmaking from the 5?
As for the passing, this was his best point of growth.
There was a large statistical jump for Williams last year, with his assists per game more than doubling from 1.2 to 2.5 and his assist percentage nearly tripling.
Some of this was more dribble-handoff work in a new offense that will naturally inflate a center’s assists, but there were plenty of nice reads in the short roll, when Williams saw multiple bodies in his way on that catch from 10-15 feet out. Some of it was because more traps were coming LaMelo Ball’s way, a good precursor to Williams playing with Booker, one of the most trapped players in the league.
When Williams gets in that pocket and extra help comes his way, he shows a great awareness of knowing it’s coming and not panicking. These look like easy passes and at times are slightly clumsy, but these are tough things to pick up as a young big and the progress is big.
Crucially, Williams did not balloon his turnover percentage with this increase. He’s always had good numbers there, so this is not a Richards situation, a guy who gives it away consistently.
This is the type of growth that is part of the fun in analyzing the league and will be for Phoenix’s rebuild over the next few years. Williams established his strengths, teams countered it a bit and he got better at neutralizing that counter. More of that process will come, and it’s good to see him up to the task.
Let’s get to the defensive side.
We have seen our share of developmental cycles for young bigs with promise, and often are they arduous. From Alex Len and Ayton, from Dragan Bender to Marquese Chriss, there is a level of minutia to the position that often stagnates and in some cases permanently stops growth.
A feel has to be ascertained in a way beyond what point guards do in running offenses. Bigs are setting screens. Seems simple enough. “Hey, you. Yeah, you. The large fella. Go stand here and stay still. Get in the way of this guy.”
But with that comes the timing of the screen, the angle of the screen, what type of screen to set, when to release from the screen and so forth. From there, it’s finding the pocket of space on a dive to the rim, whether that’s immediate (so you better have gotten off the screen quickly) or more of a delayed roll as the ball-handler threatens the key.
That’s just one specific responsibility. The defensive end quadruples this type of game-within-the-game, the inside baseball of it all.
In past generations of the sport, centers defensively were almost always playing in a drop, meaning they are at least 5 feet behind the screen getting set to fully contain the space — sometimes they’re even deeper. It is hard to think of the NBA before defensive 3 seconds was instilled in 2001, when lumbering oaf-like bigs could just sit in the key all day like they do in college, but that was the job back then.
Now, that drop and being the rim protector is all about not compromising your positioning for that rule. The Athletic’s Eric Nehm wrote a wonderful feature on Milwaukee Bucks center Brook Lopez in 2020 and how the big man mastered the “2.9,” toe-tapping out of the paint to essentially reset the timer if no opposing player entered it to achieve the same effect.
That’s just one example. Bigs will come to the level of the screen more now, another way of saying that when a ball-handler comes around the screen that the big will be right there at the same level of the screener to at least contain the initial driving path. That will escalate to a hedge, pressuring the offensive player away from the basket before recovering back toward the original assignment. It will push to the point of an all-out trap or “blitz,” cutting them off entirely with an eventual double-team well beyond the level of the screener to force the pass.
All of that, again, comes with intricacies where being just one step out of position is death. When Booker vaguely cites issues or improvements for the Suns offensively by “spacing,” that’s the stuff he means. Be in the right spot.
More accurately, the exact right spot: that help defender being 3 feet closer to impacting the on-ball play tanks the entire possession. Similarly, if a weak-side help defender is one step too close to the paint, Booker is kicking it out to the open shooter in the corner with sleepwalking ease.
That matters for no one more than the center. So, Williams still being a work in progress with that stuff as he enters Year 4 is not surprising.
Something Rudy Gobert gets zero credit for is how outstanding his balance and footwork is. Guys of his size, like Williams, will be screwed moving their feet in either on-ball situations or deeper back as the anchor if the movement is a bit rigid. That’s a trap that Williams fall into at times. When he’s shifting his weight properly, he can slide his feet on line-drive attacks on the ball. But when he flinches at a pump fake or leans the wrong way, he’s screwed.
As Williams starts to pick up the minutia more and more, his anticipatory ability should grow, thus keeping him in balance.
There are bigs who can make up for mistakes like that with how graceful and agile they are to recover in time, such as Ighodaro. That is not Williams, so he has to be air-tight. And that’s where he’ll be pretty conservative with his space and allow middies to be taken.
The Suns will take that as long as Williams’ presence at the basket is sound.
This is an example below of what being his size as a known shot-blocker will do. Dallas’ P.J. Washington rounds the screen to that aforementioned middy and misses, not wanting to challenge Williams. After a scramble, Klay Thompson is run off the line and forced inside, where Williams is once again waiting. Thompson, initially missing the wide-open kick-out to Washington in the corner, turns it over with nowhere to go after his initial blunder.
From the games of Williams I combed through, the big man hardly played anything other than a drop. A lack of defensive scheme versatility on ball screens, with how the bigs are attacking it, makes it exponentially harder to not only win in the playoffs, but get to the playoffs.
With the learning curve ahead for Maluach and his current limitations, that will be an uphill task for the Suns to consider both short-term and long-term. Keep a close eye on how often head coach Jordan Ott challenges his two young centers to get aggressive in those settings.
Williams can also get bodied a bit. In that Dallas game, there was a stretch where the much wider Daniel Gafford was taking his lunch money a bit in the physicality department. Williams doesn’t shy away from it, but at 240 pounds, guys like Gafford (265) can push him around.
All told, Williams has more than enough proven skill and improvement to become a worthwhile addition for the Suns. It’s just a matter of whether his health and the fit itself in the center rotation will allow all of that to come to fruition.