Duke’s Zion Williamson Named 2019 Naismith Award Winner over Ja Morant, More

Sean Rayford/Associated Press

Zion Williamson missed five-plus games due to a knee injury this college basketball season.

That still wasn’t enough for anyone to catch him in the men’s race for Naismith College Player of the Year. The Atlanta Tipoff Club named Williamson the recipient of the 2019 honor Sunday. He won the award over Murray State’s Ja Morant, Tennessee’s Grant Williams and Gonzaga’s Rui Hachimura.

Williamson is the eighth Duke player to take home POTY honors and first since J.J. Redick in 2006. He’s the third freshman to ever take home an award regularly given to upperclassmen, joining Kevin Durant (2007) and Anthony Davis (2012).

Like Durant and Davis before him, Williamson needed a spectacular freshman season to trump the work of a strong upperclassmen crew. And perhaps more than any other freshman before him, Williamson captivated in such a degree that this award was a no-brainer—even after a knee injury cost him a chunk of time.

Williamson will go down as one of the most exciting players in college basketball history. He averaged 22.6 points, 8.9 rebounds, 2.1 assists, 2.1 steals and 1.8 blocks a night, numbers more than well-rounded enough to earn him the honors on that alone.

But it was the way Williamson played that put the country in a perpetual state of slack jaw. Listed at 6’7″ and 285 pounds, Williamson dominated with his sheer power and his LeBronian athleticism. He was a nightly highlight film, to the point people are already clamoring for him to be in next year’s Slam Dunk Contest.

“He’s unreal. We were talking about him the other day in our team room,” Steph Curry told reporters. “He has a lot of hype around him and he’s unbelievably talented, but you can’t teach, like, his passion and the way that … he plays. He plays hard every possession and I think that’s an underrated skill that kids can kind of emulate.”

Of course, sometimes Zion is a little too powerful for his own good. His season nearly ended when his Nike shoe exploded in a game against North Carolina, causing his knee to buckle in an awkward direction. Zion missed most of the last six games of the season, a stretch in which the Blue Devils went 3-3.

Williamson returned to the lineup for the ACC tournament, leading the Blue Devils to a conference championship and securing the No. 1 overall seed for the NCAA tournament. He averaged 26.0 points, 8.5 rebounds, 1.8 assists, 1.8 blocks and 1.5 steals during Duke’s run to the Elite Eight. Despite inconsistent play from his supporting cast, Williamson carried the Blue Devils to tourney wins until they ran into a veteran Michigan State team.

“He’s got the most incredible first step,” Michigan State coach Tom Izzo told reporters of Williamson. “That’s why he’s getting all those steals. He can take one dribble and cover more space than most human beings that I know can do. And so then he has the strength to finish at the end. So he’s not Superman, but he’s damn close.”

Williamson said it’s highly likely he’ll enter his name into the 2019 NBA draft, and his on-court career at Duke didn’t end the way he hoped. That said, going out as the best player in college basketball is not a bad consolation.