‘Old-school T.J.’ is back: Williams’ takeover fuels Wichita State to 2OT escape
Back in Wichita, Tim Williams hurried home, plopped on his couch, settled in front of his big-screen television with surround sound and flipped his phone to do not disturb.
No spoilers, right?
He had just finished his daughter’s basketball practice, drove back across town and arrived home. This wasn’t background noise at the end of the long day. This was appointment viewing.
His job on the third shift was coming. But a nap could wait. He wanted to see his son play.
And like any father who has watched his kid hoop for years, he picked up on the smallest tells. The first time T.J. checked in, he contested a shot at the foul line and then exploded into the lane to sky for the rebound. Tim saw the bounce. Noticed the juice. The kind that hadn’t always looked the same since the concussion in January. That’s when he felt it: tonight might be different.
As the wildest game of Wichita State’s season spiraled into chaos, Tim texted his boss and told him he was going to be late for work.
Then double overtime hit and T.J. took over. Tim doesn’t think he sat down once. He leapt from the couch, clapped, hollered — living every possession as his son put the Shockers’ offense on his back and dragged them to the finish line. When T.J. scored the go-ahead basket that sealed a 92-89 double-overtime win over East Carolina at Minges Coliseum, nearly 1,300 miles away, Tim was going crazy in his Wichita basement.
“I was beside myself in my own home,” Tim said, laughing. “It was just good to see him playing his style of basketball again. He looked like the old-school T.J. to me. I’m so proud of him.”
For any Wichita hoops fan who watched Williams run the show for Wichita Heights in the City League, Wednesday night felt familiar — the same poise, physicality and left hand that he used to bend a game to his will.
That version of Williams resurfaced in full, delivering the breakout performance of his young college career: 27 points on 11-of-15 shooting with eight rebounds off the bench to power WSU (17-10, 9-5) to a critical win that kept the Shockers in second place in the American Conference race.
Back home in Wichita, his former high school coach, Joe Auer, watched with a grin — and with the perspective to understand the emotional layer some fans might miss. Williams grew up a die-hard Shocker fan, even serving as a ball boy during the program’s golden era, and has long dreamed of being a Shocker.
“Watching a young man live out his life-long dream and play for Wichita State, it’s one of the greatest joys you get in this business when you’re a coach,” Auer said. “T.J. grew up in a Shocker family. They are huge Shocker fans. So you know how darn important it is for him to help this team win. You can really see it all over his body language and his face.”
On Wednesday, Williams looked like the kid Auer coached for four years: a 6-foot-5 playmaker comfortable with the ball in his hands in the game’s biggest moments.
The Shockers needed every last drop of that confidence. After two separate miracles provided by Kenyon Giles extended the game to a second overtime, WSU turned the keys to the offense over to the redshirt freshman and let him completely take over.
In the second overtime, WSU ran the offense through Williams on six straight possessions and came away with points every single time — four baskets from Williams himself and two more scoring plays created with his passing.
After spending more than a month trying to find his rhythm again after a concussion sustained on Jan. 7, Williams became the Wichita State problem that East Carolina could not solve.
“They were just denying KG so much, so we kept putting T.J. over there and he just kept making plays,” Wichita State coach Paul Mills said on his postgame radio interview. “We needed T.J. to be able to turn around and play downhill and he was able to do that because they were so extended.”
That’s been the puzzle in conference play for Williams: what to do with the space defenses willingly give him.
Because Williams hasn’t yet developed a consistent outside shot, opponents have been comfortable sagging off him on the perimeter. They plug gaps, crowd the paint and try to suffocate the driving lanes for Giles and other WSU creators. For weeks after his concussion, Williams didn’t punish that coverage with enough force to bend defenses back.
On Wednesday, he did. Early, often and, eventually, relentlessly.
In the first half, he claimed one of those chess-match wins when he took a handoff on the perimeter with room to attack. He used his physicality to bump the defender backward while driving, spun back left and finished off the glass with his preferred left hand. In the second half, when his defender left to double Giles, Williams caught the ball with space at the top, attacked off the dribble and banked in a floater.
He flashed his point-guard chops, too. Midway through the second half, Williams caught it open up top, probed the defense to draw two defenders and swung a cross-court pass to Karon Boyd for a corner 3.
But his inexperience also showed up, the kinds of mistakes that are part of learning how to stay locked in during games at this level.
Near the end of the first half, WSU needed to simply dribble across midcourt and call timeout to set up the final play. Instead, Williams pulled down the rebound, dribbled ahead, then threw a lazy backward pass that ECU’s Jordan Riley picked off for a dunk. Later in the game, Williams was a little too eager on a trap and fouled Riley about 40 feet from the basket with five seconds left on the shot clock.
That could have tanked a freshman’s confidence. For Williams, he kept pushing.
His athleticism flashed late in regulation when he slid his feet and stayed vertical to force a miss by Riley, then sprinted out in transition and finished through the lane to end a nearly five-minute WSU scoring drought. In overtime, he did it again: catching ahead in transition and detonating for a dunk that briefly pushed the Shockers in front.
And with WSU teetering late in the first overtime, Williams steadied them at the line, burying two free throws while trailing 77-74 to trim the deficit to one with less than a minute left.
“It’s not like this was our first time (down on the road),” Williams said in his postgame radio interview. “We have a group that’s going to keep level-headed. Heads up, chests out. Nobody is going to be down. And when we smell blood in the water, we’ve got a whole of sharks in that locker room.”
Then came the second overtime when a strong performance turned into a signature one for Williams.
After ECU extended its lead to 86-83, WSU started spamming ball screens for Williams with the Pirates more concerned with denying Giles. ECU went under the screen, even at the foul line, and Williams countered by taking the position and posting up, keeping his dribble alive and then attacking to his left for a short floater while getting fouled to draw WSU within one.
With ECU scoring on its first six possessions of the second overtime, WSU needed points on every trip. Williams kept delivering.
After ECU went up 87-85, Williams came off another ball screen, attacked and found Boyd on a back cut that produced free throws. Riley answered with a jumper for an 89-86 lead, then Williams went right back to work, running the same screen with Emmanuel Okorafor and this time finding the WSU center on the roll with a pocket pass for a dunk to make it 89-88 with 1:09 left.
When ECU finally came up empty, Williams pulled down the rebound and WSU dialed up the same exact ball screen. This time, ECU switched its 6-foot-10 center onto Williams and left him on an island with the clock under 30 seconds.
On paper, it was WSU’s power forward matched up with ECU’s center. But in reality, Williams has been a point guard his whole life. And it showed in that encounter, as he feinted right, then powered back to his left hand, bumped through contact and finished under control while drawing the foul to put WSU up 90-89 with 23.2 seconds left.
The free throw didn’t fall, but the damage was done. On six consecutive trips with the ball in his hands, Williams guided WSU to scores every time, 11 points and the lead.
“What a heck of a performance for a freshman,” Auer said. “We watched him do a lot of the things that he did for the Falcons over his four-year career.”
Williams began the year in WSU’s starting lineup and was well on his way to a standout debut, averaging 9.5 points, 5.1 rebounds and 1.8 assists before a concussion in the Rice game on Jan. 7 knocked him out of rhythm and forced him to miss time. When he returned, his role shifted to off the bench and his confidence appeared to dip, as he averaged 3.9 points and 3.1 rebounds over his first eight games back.
Last Saturday against Tulsa, Williams started to look like himself again with nine points and eight rebounds. When WSU needed someone to step up, Williams was ready with the best game of his career.
And back in Wichita, Tim showed up a little late to work on Wednesday night. No one minded. He couldn’t wipe the grin off his face.
Old-school T.J. was back.
“When he has the ball in his hands and runs the offense, those are usually the results,” Tim said. “Honestly, I’m not even surprised.”
.jpg)