Brian Windhorst
Oklahoma City Thunder star forward Jalen Williams said he took nearly 30 painkilling injections in his injured right wrist to get through his team’s recent championship run.
In a video posted to his YouTube page on Tuesday, Williams said he’d been dealing with a sprained right wrist for much of the season. Then he felt his right scapholunate ligament tear and his hand was “on fire” after getting tied up with Phoenix Suns ‘ star Devin Booker while chasing a loose ball on April 9.
Over the next 11 weeks as the Thunder won four series to win the title, the team’s training staff used various and elaborate taping techniques, most of them hidden under an arm sleeve, to manage the injury. Williams said he got lidocaine injections before each game in his wrist and several times just to practice. He took so many needles, he said, he developed a callous at the injection site.
Williams had surgery to correct the injury last week.
“I got 28 or 29 shots in my hand throughout the playoffs,” Williams said on the video. “And I was like ‘that can’t be for nothing, we have to win.’ So that was my mentality.”
Williams, who said he used the memory of Kobe Bryant and his well-known history of playing through injury as motivation, had to change his jump shot form to keep the ball more on his fingertips so he didn’t have to rely on his wrist as much. He went through several shooting slumps in the postseason managing the injury and said he had the most issues in the second round series against the Denver Nuggets, when he aggravated the injury several times. He shot just 38% in the series and 23% on 3-pointers and went just 10-of-43 shooting in Games 4-6 of that series.
After he struggled in a series loss in last year’s second round, Williams said it was hard to hear criticism of his performance and stay silent about the extent of the injury so as not to tip off opponents.
“I didn’t want to tell the world that I was hurt and so the world just ganged up on me about how I wasn’t ready for the moment. Which is obviously is wrong now,” Williams said. “But that was the most annoying thing because human nature is you want to just scream that you’re hurt. But I was able to lock in and not use that as an excuse.”
Williams had several crucial huge performances in the Thunder’s run including a 40-point Game 5 in the NBA Finals against the Indiana Pacers that gave the Thunder a vital 3-2 lead. He also had 34 points in Minnesota in a pivotal Game 4 of the Western Conference finals.
“We won a championship, you can say whatever you want to say now,” Williams said. “I will be getting my ring sized here shortly.”
Thunder president Sam Presti praised Williams after the Finals for playing through the pain and never using it as an excuse.
“He powered through. He showed incredible mental endurance and security in himself,” Presti said. “I really thought it was pretty impressive that he just kept moving along with no excuses and obviously played his best basketball down the stretch of the season.”