Spurs guard Tre Jones on what it’s like to play with Zion Williamson and Victor Wembanyama،
SAN ANTONIO — When Victor Wembanyama and Zion Williamson face off Friday night, there will be a common thread connecting them beyond their status as former No. 1 overall picks with incredible highlights.
That link is Tre Jones.
The San Antonio Spurs starting point guard is the only player to start games alongside the New Orleans Pelicans' Williamson and the Spurs' Wembanyama – playing with Williamson during the 2018-19 season at Duke and then this season with Wembanyama. Spurs goalkeeper Devonte' Graham also played with both players but was never in the starting lineup with either of them, leaving Jones at his own club.
Jones, who is in his fourth season with the Spurs, had a front-row seat to see Williamson and Wembanyama early in their playing careers – Williamson as an 18-year-old at Duke and Wembanyama as a 19-year-old. years old when he joined Spurs this season.
“It’s one of two for them, with the body they’re given and their athletic ability, which is crazy,” Jones told ESPN when asked to compare the two, “but I think that what comes out is that they want to win.” and that comes first. »
Friday's game will be the third between the Pelicans and Spurs this season, but only the second meeting between Williamson and Wembanyama, who missed the Dec. 1 game in the second end of a back-to-back. When the two faced off on December 17, Wembanyama outscored Williamson 17-15 and had 13 rebounds and four blocks, but Williamson's Pelicans came away with a 146-110 victory, tied for their largest margin of victory. victory this season.
Williamson, who is listed as questionable for Friday's game because of a left foot injury, and the Pelicans are fighting for a Western Conference playoff spot, while the Spurs are stuck in the basement. But Jones sees how easy they make things look on the field and can watch them struggle for years.
“They both think the game is at a very high level, and I think [it] it just comes from the fact that they're competitive and they want to win,” Jones said. “They know that they can dominate the game in so many different ways and just the fact that sometimes they're able to defer to others because the way teams play them and the amount of attention they bring to the field or on double teams they bring instead of forcing it, they are still able to make the right play basketball at the end of the day to put our team in the best position to win.”
A five-star recruit himself, Jones was part of a stellar recruiting class at Duke that had commitments from future NBA lottery picks RJ Barrett and Cam Reddish even before Williamson announced he would join them in Durham, North Carolina.
Yet Jones remembers exactly where he was when he found out Williamson would be joining them.
“I was at my brother’s game, a Timberwolves game,” Jones said. “I was sitting in our season ticket seats, just relaxing.”
Jones' brother, Tyus, was in the middle of his third season with the Minnesota Timberwolves and he felt a murmur run through the crowd after Williamson's decision. He said people were stopping him with excitement about how he could play with Williamson next season.
Jones was recovering from an injury when he arrived at Duke that summer, so he wasn't able to get on the field right away with Williamson, but he was able to watch. And he knew right away that it was going to be something fun.
“The quickness he had, the explosiveness… some of the plays he made were crazy and it was probably even crazier than some of the ones we saw he made in games his first year,” Jones said. “It was just weird. You can't even really explain what he was doing there. It was just his athletic ability and his strength and everything rolled into one.”
While Jones was surrounded by thousands of people when he found out about Williamson's commitment, circumstances were a little different when he found out he was going to play with Wembanyama.
“I was relaxing at home, obviously heart racing a little bit thinking about what could happen if we had him,” Jones said.
“I'm just watching the lottery go by, obviously not really knowing all the possibilities with the ping pong balls being thrown around and everything, but at the end of the day obviously the No. 2 pick was announced and we knew we'd get the number 2… 1 choice.”
Jones knew there was something special about Wembanyama from the start of the first training sessions of the summer, much like he felt with Williamson. Still, Jones said Wembanyama has come a long way from those times to now.
“I think what stood out to me the most was the way he thought about the game,” Jones said. “You could give him the ball anywhere on the court. He read the court really well. He saw cuts, he saw open guys, he saw the double team coming right away. He just thought about the one-man play very high level, even if the game is a little different, he was still able to think the game at such a high level.”
Wembanyama and Williamson have very different frames. Williamson is 6 feet 6 inches tall and weighs 285 pounds. Wembanyama is almost a foot taller and stands 7 feet 4 inches tall, but only weighs 210 pounds on his body. Still, Jones said their games had a distinct similarity: There wasn't a lob he could throw that they couldn't hit.
“I don’t think I’ve ever thrown one that he didn’t make at Duke, whether it was in practice or in games,” Jones said of Williamson. “It was similar to Victor. Obviously he's not 7 feet tall, but just his ability to locate the ball in the air and go get it, no matter where he was, no matter who was around, he went Get the lob somehow.
There's a bit of a different catch radius when it comes to throwing lobs to Wembanyama, including one of the first in-game ones they connected on in the preseason.
On October 13, in a preseason game against the Miami Heat, Jones set a ball screen for Wembanyama, who passed the ball to Jones on the right wing. Wembanyama then cut to the basket and Jones immediately dropped a pass as Wembanyama just crossed the 3-point line.
It became an alley-oop.
“And it still looked like the object could have been thrown higher or further behind him or something,” Jones said. “It always looked like such an easy play, a routine play for him, even though he was on the 3-point line when the ball was in the air, and he caught it in the middle of the lane. It is crazy and it makes it seem so easy, so nonchalant, so routine… It's not something we've ever seen before.”
But despite all the highlight-reel dunks, the two No. 1 picks have accumulated — Wembanyama ranks fourth in the NBA this season with 100 dunks, while Williamson is tied for 33rd with 50 — the plays that Jones stands out the most . “The mind is a pair of blocks.
While a few plays stood out at Duke – a coast-to-coast rebound to dunk against Virginia at home against Cavaliers 7-foot-1 center Jay Huff or the game when Williamson returned from the burst of the shoe in the ACC tournament against Syracuse and had 29 points and 14 rebounds on 13-of-13 shooting – the main one also occurring on February 9 against Virginia.
That's when Williamson took off from the paint and managed to block a 3-point attempt in the corner from De'Andre Hunter, the No. 4 overall pick in the 2019 draft.
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Zion rises for a vicious blockade
Zion Williamson shows off his athleticism as he rushes toward a wide-open Virginia player and takes flight for a nasty block.
“It wasn’t like we were playing 5- to 10-year-olds in an exhibition game,” Jones said. “He was a top-10, maybe top-five pick, and he makes some weird plays.”
Jones said it was difficult to determine which play stood out to Wembanyama this season, but the no-look block he had against Tre's brother Tyus on Jan. 20 stood out.
“He catches lobs that he dives back, 360s and in the air, but yeah, the no-look block that has to be up there,” Jones said. He didn't know where his man was, so he turned around to find him, then he didn't know where the shot was going, he raised his hand, but he still managed to block it with the other side of the field. painting too. We've never seen that before.
