While Deron Williams spent the last two weeks watching the Nets rack up one win after another, he saw how well the team was playing without him. So, with Williams set to return for Monday’s Martin Luther King Day matinee against the Knicks at Madison Square Garden, he went to Jason Kidd with an idea: To come off the bench.
So, for the first time since February of his rookie year, the star point guard wasn’t part of the starting lineup for his team, scoring 13 points and dishing out three assists in 27 minutes to help the Nets blow out the Knicks, 103-80.
“We’ve been play so well with that lineup, why shake things up?” Williams said. “I don’t care if I come off the bench or start or whatever.
“With the way Joe [Johnson’s] been playing first quarters, first halves, I don’t want to disrupt that.”
While Johnson once again went off early, scoring 12 points in the first quarter and 20 in the first half, Williams started slowly. After immediately driving down the lane and flipping in a short floater, he then missed his next three shots — all 3-pointers — before going 3-for-6 in the fourth quarter.
“A little bit … I’m still getting there, still working through it,” he said. “But I started feeling a little better.”
Williams returned after missing the last five games following his latest sprain to his left ankle, and after receiving cortisone shots and platelet rich plasma injections in both ankles. He’s now missed 16 games this season because of his troublesome ankles, after missing four — and getting three separate sets of cortisone shots, plus a round of PRP treatment — last season.
Now that he’s back on the court, he hopes it will be the last time he has to work his way back into shape after sitting out, and that he can have the same kind of response this year to the PRP treatment that he did last year, when he had it just before the All-Star break and responded by averaging 22.9 points and 8.0 assists down the stretch.
“I hope so, he said. “I hope I can stop doing this. It’s becoming a theme. It’s not good to struggle in the first half of the season, get your legs in the second. I’ve just got to figure out what’s going on.”
But, in order to do that, Williams has to see how his ankle responds.
“That’s kind of the test,” he said. “We’ll see how it feels [Tuesday], and really [Monday night].”