Cody Williams’ embarrassing history forces Thunder star to defend him

In the words of Break bad‘s Hector Salamanca, “La familia es todo (family is everything).” Jalen Williams clearly takes this saying to heart. After his brother, Utah Jazz winger Cody Williams, was criticized for posting the lowest plus-minus in NBA history, Jalen made it clear that such a statistic doesn’t matter and that the bigger headline was that he played well.

After the League Alerts Instagram account noted Williams’ performance in the Jazz’s blowout loss to the Charlotte Hornets, Williams responded to a comment that said, “Imagine your brother dropping 40 in the finals and then you do this (expletive)” with “he played well…so let’s emphasize that too, I was -40 and won a final, plus minus a useless stat.”

Jalen has emerged as one of the NBA’s young stars, making his first All-Star team, first All-NBA team, his first All-Defensive team, winning a title and winning NBA Finals MVP all at once. That’s crazy impressive, and part of the reason why Cody had some expectations.

Cody hasn’t managed to fulfill this yet, but his somewhat inspiring play of late should give Utah some confidence that all hope is not lost. Yes, he recently made history in a pretty embarrassing way, but that clearly didn’t deter the Jazz as he got the start in their game against the Cleveland Cavaliers.

Of course, no one wants to see a repeat of that, but it’s also fair to suggest that with the Jazz’s full tanking efforts, such games and individual performances could well happen.

Jalen isn’t wrong, by the way

Cody still had a pretty solid performance; scoring fifteen points on five-on-nine shooting isn’t that bad. And while the plus/minus is a concern, Utah’s undershooting at home can’t all be attributed to one person. If you lose by 50, it’s a team issue, not a player issue.

More importantly, these types of stats from Williams were ones the Jazz never saw from him in his rookie year. They gave him so many opportunities, which he never took advantage of last year, to the point that many had lost faith in him as his rookie season came to an end.

Now Utah is seeing results. Not the most ideal results, but at least he’s visible on the floor now, which he wasn’t last year. Now that Williams has shown he’s not a lost cause, the Jazz have every reason to take another look at what he could be as a player. Especially if he doesn’t get in the way of their plans this season.