Jalen Williams learned lessons early in season that paid off with dominant 40-point Game 5 in NBA Finals

OKLAHOMA CITY — Jason Williams’ forceful, epic Game 5 did not start out looking like that at all. He struggled to create his own shot at the outset of the night, and while he had a few dunks, he missed a couple of floaters (one from each side of the basket) and a couple of midrange shots in the first quarter.

That didn’t faze Williams, he had been there before — he started the season with some rough patches, but he also knew he put in the work to improve.

“There’s times earlier in the season where he had some ugly plays, ugly games, trying to establish the type force you saw tonight,” Thunder coach Mark Daigneault said. “I complimented him back then. But he’s trying to make an All-Star team. He’s an All-NBA player this season… The way that you accomplish your goals and become the player you’re going to be is by improving.”

“I’m extremely fortunate that I have a coach and a staff and teammates that allow me to have those ugly plays during the year and figure out my game,” Williams said. “I think right now it’s paid off, to be honest. Just like, I understand the level of physicality I have to do in order to be good. Yeah, like I said, I’m just extremely fortunate that I have a coach that allowed me to go through that process of figuring out what I’m good at and just like what I need to do in order to be successful.”

That improvement paid off with a 40-point night in the biggest game of the year and it has Williams and the Thunder on the doorstep of an NBA title.

The biggest question the Thunder faced entering the playoffs was whether Williams (and Chet Holmgren) would be able to step up and be the secondary scorer the Thunder needed alongside Shai Gilgeous-Alexander. A year ago, Williams was not fully ready for that role.

He is now. Williams was the best player on the floor in Game 5.

After that slow start Monday night, Williams found his footing by working hard off the ball to get his opportunities — there were a couple of second-quarter back cuts that got him buckets and that got him going. Over the course of these Finals, Williams has become increasingly adept at exploiting the Pacers’ defensive focus on Shai Gilgeous-Alexander against them — when the Pacers start to slide help to Andrew Nembhard to keep SGA from making a play, Williams is using that space to make his own play. He’s also a beast in isolation and the Pacers have nobody who can stop him from getting to the rim. Williams has found his confidence and his rhythm and has become a force the Pacers could not tame.

It wasn’t just Williams celebrating that, it was his teammates.

“He’s one of those guys that you want to see succeed, especially when you know him personally,” Chet Holmgren said of Williams. “You want to root for him. You want him to do good just because he shows up every single day, does the right things. He’s a good guy off the court, treats everybody well. He’s always respectful. He works really hard. You want to see it pay off for him. We saw it tonight. Not only tonight. We don’t get here without him playing as good as he’s playing. So, we got to make sure he gets his credit, gets his flowers.”

“He was, like, really gutsy tonight,” said Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, who added 31 points and 10 assists in OKC’s win. “He stepped into big plays. Felt like every time we needed a shot, he made it. He wasn’t afraid. He was fearless tonight.”

A sign of how fearless Williams played was how he attacked the rim, as he made 16 of his 25 shots in the paint, plus getting to the free throw line 12 times. When asked about how J-Dub played, Daigneault used two words.

“Great force,” Daigneault said. “I mean, that’s the word. We’ve used that word with him in his development. When he’s at his best he’s playing with that type of force. That was an unbelievable performance by him, just throughout the whole game. He really was on the gas the entire night. Applied a ton of pressure.”

“I think the playing with force, yes, it puts pressure on officials to make a call,” Williams said. “At the same time, like halfway through the year, this was part of me and Mark talking about what it’s going to take. I was figuring out my game a lot of it was not just looking for a foul, being able to finish through contact. From there, if you finish through contact and make the shot, you don’t really need the foul. That’s kind of the way I’ve been approaching it. Being aggressive, getting to the rim, playing through a lot of the contact.”

He played through a lot of contact in Game 5. If J-Dub can play with that same force on the road in Game 6, Oklahoma City could be celebrating a title on the Pacers’ home court.