Robert Williams III aka "Timelord" thread

Welcome to our community

Be a part of something great, join today!

Register Log in
blazerfan11 said:
Here's one condition he has: popliteal artery entrapment syndrome (PAES)

https://www.boston.com/sports/bosto...illiams-popliteal-artery-entrapment-syndrome/

The Celtics were aware of the condition prior to selecting Williams with the 27th overall pick, according to the report.

Celtics draft pick Robert Williams has popliteal artery entrapment syndrome (PAES) in both of his legs, MassLive’s Fred Katz reported Monday night citing multiple sources.

PAES is a rare vascular disease in which the positioning of one’s muscles and tendons causes compression of the main artery that runs through the knee. It is most often found in male athletes under the age of 30. According to the Cleveland Clinic, patients with PAES typically suffer from “aching pain, numbness, and tiredness or cramping in the calf when they exercise,” but the symptoms are typically alleviated after three to five minutes of rest.

Katz reported Williams has been playing with PAES “for years” and that a source said his condition was “not too serious.” According to Katz, the Celtics were aware of the condition prior to selecting Williams with the 27th overall pick in the 2018 NBA Draft. Texas A&M, where Williams played two seasons of college basketball, was also reportedly aware.

Williams has missed back-to-back summer league games due to an injured right knee. He banged knees with an opposing player late in the first half of his debut Friday and later revealed his bumped knee is also suffering tendinitis.
Click to expand...
This is why I prefer only 14-15mpg for him. He showed a lot of different skills playing with Boston and obviously showed he’s a contributor on a contending team. But we won’t be contending this season. The best thing to do is play him in limited spurts and see if he can change the game in that amount of time. The time to worry about with Williams is 2-3 years from now why Scoot and Shae will be towards the end of their rookie deals with some experience under their belts. If he’s healthy, he will be a major contributor. When we are out of contention for the play-in or maybe even the 8th seed if we want to start tanking early, don’t even think think about playing Williams.

The best thing we can hope for is a team sees Williams dominate games for us in little stretches and is willing to bet on giving him a bigger role.
 
BankTeller said:
This is why I prefer only 14-15mpg for him. He showed a lot of different skills playing with Boston and obviously showed he’s a contributor on a contending team. But we won’t be contending this season. The best thing to do is play him in limited spurts and see if he can change the game in that amount of time. The time to worry about with Williams is 2-3 years from now why Scoot and Shae will be towards the end of their rookie deals with some experience under their belts. If he’s healthy, he will be a major contributor. When we are out of contention for the play-in or maybe even the 8th seed if we want to start tanking early, don’t even think think about playing Williams.

The best thing we can hope for is a team sees Williams dominate games for us in little stretches and is willing to bet on giving him a bigger role.
Click to expand...
This is why Boston obviously had him on a minutes restriction, that and the fact that the dude has missed time with knee surgeries and knee pain many many times in his young career.
 
By Sam Quinn
Sep 23, 2022 at 2:32 pm ET•1 min read

Celtics' Robert Williams III undergoes knee surgery, will resume basketball activities in 8-12 weeks
Boston Celtics center Robert Williams III underwent arthroscopic knee surgery this week, but the timeline on his recovery has changed. While initial reports suggested that Williams would be out for 4-6 weeks, the Celtics announced in a statement that he will resume basketball activities in 8-12 weeks.

Williams has a lengthy injury history, and most notably, he suffered a torn meniscus last season that kept him out of the end of the regular season while limiting him in the playoffs. Williams is very reliant on his athleticism. He is one of the NBA's premier rim protectors and overall defenders, so getting him back up to 100 percent physically is absolutely essential.

The Celtics started last season 23-24, but skyrocketed up to the top of the standings when they tweaked Williams' role defensively to allow him more flexibility to roam around and make plays. The Celtics wound up finishing with the NBA's No. 1 defense, and had Williams remained healthy, it is possible that he, not teammate Marcus Smart, would have won the league's Defensive Player of the Year award.



 
After only playing 35 games in the 2022-23 regular season (averaging 23.5 mpg) , Timelord played every game (20 games) in the 2023 playoffs averaging 21 minutes a game.

upload_2023-10-4_17-53-21.png
 

Attachments

  • upload_2023-10-4_17-53-21.png
    upload_2023-10-4_17-53-21.png
    289.2 KB · Views: 141
BankTeller said:
This is all from one year. What about the other years he’s been in the league?
Click to expand...

He's missed a lot of regular season games, but in the last two playoffs, 2022 and 2023, he missed 7 games out of 44, and played in all 20 playoff games in 2023.


upload_2023-10-4_18-12-54.png

upload_2023-10-4_18-13-54.png

upload_2023-10-4_18-17-45.png
 

Attachments

  • upload_2023-10-4_18-12-54.png
    upload_2023-10-4_18-12-54.png
    113 KB · Views: 132
  • upload_2023-10-4_18-13-54.png
    upload_2023-10-4_18-13-54.png
    111.8 KB · Views: 131
  • upload_2023-10-4_18-17-45.png
    upload_2023-10-4_18-17-45.png
    312.1 KB · Views: 135
Last edited:
If you have 6 minutes, Mike Richman quickly goes over the health of both Williams and Brogdon. Well done by him. You can skip ahead to 2:14 which I have done in the clip below.

Good news: Brogdon's trade to the Clippers wasn't nixed necessarily because of poor health. It was because of a deadline for the Porzingis trade. There was no time for a physical.
The trade didn't happen because the Clippers weren't able to review his medicals.

Bad News: Williams is probably not the same player that was a DPOY candidate.

 
Mike Richman said in the video I linked to earlier that Robert Williams works great as a "roamer" on defense. Boston would put Williams on the other teams worst offensive player so Williams could come out of nowhere on help defense.
That's his best case scenario for the Blazers.

When Horford and Williams played together, they got north of 80% of the rebounds according to Richman. You did not get many second shots.

When/if Ayton and Williams are playing together, the Trail Blazers could(should) be an elite rebounding team that can run.
 
Last edited:
AlexHoops says (and shows) that Robert Williams is a much better passer than the stats show. He has a great feel for the game.

He even recorded a triple double on new year's eve 2021.

video dated Mar 16, 2022



This one also. Using Rob Williams as a high-post passer.

How the Boston Celtics Used Robert Williams to Unlock Their Offense

AlexHoops: It's coincidentally very similar to how the Warriors operate with Draymond Green as the facilitator surrounding him with shooters and constant motion and cutting.
Perimeter shooting from your front court still is at a premium, but this approach to offense is proof of concept that it's not mandatory to have front court spacing as much as it's important to have a center that can make quick decisions and find guys making good cuts if your goal is to have your team execute an offensive game plan that prioritizes off-ball movement on the wings. I think this is where the quote-unquote center position is heading. To where you don't have to have five 3-point shooters on the floor.

Sep 30, 2022

 
Last edited:
blazerfan11 said:
Bad News: Williams is probably not the same player that was a DPOY candidate.

Click to expand...
Right. I think somebody already pointed this out, but his block % has fallen from 12 as a rookie to 5 last year.
 
"Celtics' all-defensive center Robert Williams III underwent a left knee scope and is expected to miss 4-to-6 weeks, potentially sidelining Williams III for the start of the 2022-23 season.

The news of Williams' recent surgery raise concerns he may be dealing with early arthritis in his left knee, according to the Pro Basketball Docs. If that is the case, he will likely require more rest days to sustain his knee health over the season.
Among the Celtics' community, the surgery has raised more questions about the elite defensive force's long-term health.

Bulls' young point guard Lonzo Ball underwent a similar procedure in January to treat a meniscus and bone bruise injury and is still sidelined by lingering soreness.

Williams dropped in the 2018 Draft because of bilateral knee tendonitis and has been a limited contributor for most of his career to manage his knees."
https://sicscore.com/nba/updates/ro...surgery-signals-potential-left-knee-arthritis
 
e_blazer said:
It’s a nickname given Williams after he was drafted. He overslept and missed his introductory conference call with the media and subsequently missed his flight to Boston.
Click to expand...
Yeah I’ve seen that story like 10 times, but why the words TimeLord?
Is that some comic book character?
Why not LateAss?
 
THE HCP said:
Yeah I’ve seen that story like 10 times, but why the words TimeLord?
Is that some comic book character?
Why not LateAss?
Click to expand...

The best one.
image
 
THE HCP said:
Yeah I’ve seen that story like 10 times, but why the words TimeLord?
Is that some comic book character?
Why not LateAss?
Click to expand...

“Instead of calling me ‘Robert,’ they call me ‘Time Lord.’ But I don't know where that sh*t came from,” Williams said.

https://www.sportskeeda.com/basketball/why-robert-williams-called-time-lord

After being drafted No. 27 by Boston in the 2018 NBA draft, Williams was scheduled for his introductory conference call with reporters. However, Williams overslept and missed the call as well as his flight to Boston. It probably wasn’t the start to his NBA career that he envisioned, but luckily for the big man, Celtics fans didn’t take it personally.

Instead, a die-hard Celtics fan named Ryan Hebert made the most of Williams’ mishap by coming up with a nickname for him - The Time Lord. The moniker then quickly caught on, starting with Celtics' Twitter and then into the mainstream media as well.

During an interview with Mass Live in 2018, Hebert broke down why he chose the nickname. He said that he had been scouting Williams as a potential Celtics draft prospect for two years and always knew he was going to be a Celtic eventually. So Hebert joked that Williams wasn’t actually late for his press conference but that he was instead operating on "a different timeline."

“So (we) started joking that he wasn’t late, he was operating on a different timeline concurrent to the one we are in, as evidenced by the fact that I knew he was a Celtic two years before he was a Celtic,” Hebert said.

“And we would do it with people taking themselves really seriously and they’d get very mad at us for thinking they were too uptight. So, from there he became a Time Lord, like the characters in Doctor Who whose time travel can tie together terrible holes in the plot of a shoddy script.”
Hebert then did his best to simplify his explanation of the nickname for those who were still confused:

“Basically, Time Lord boiled down to the prediction of drafting him in 2018 and also defending him against uptight people who were earnestly acting like they've never been late to work in their lives," Hebert said.

“We are online so much that we have to do absurd things to show people how stupid it is to say a mega-athlete with a savant-like feel for timing, blocks and passing is a bust because they missed a flight. We all love Robert and are pulling for him as a pro and as a person and this is our bizarre way of going about it.”

Upon his Time Lord nickname catching on early in his rookie season, Robert Williams was very confused as to why everyone was calling him that:

“Instead of calling me ‘Robert,’ they call me ‘Time Lord.’ But I don't know where that sh*t came from,” Williams said.

However, the nickname has since grown on Williams as he now finds it fitting for his time-stopping blocked shots:

“So when I got drafted, I missed a press conference over the phone,” Williams told Sky Sports.“And they start calling me Time Lord, like being late. But I got on the court playing and it was saying like, ‘Oh, he’s stopping time to go over there and block shots.’ So, I can’t hate on that, it was decent. I liked it. I’ve been rocking with Time Lord ever since.”
 
blazerfan11 said:
Aren't Ayton and Rob Williams the best center duo in the league? adding them together. Who's better?
Click to expand...
Jokic + anyone, Embiid + anyone

Williams has had multiple surgeries on his knees. Can anyone list guys who's knees went under the knife early on as much as his have and then gone on to a long productive career? Portland's young talent is years away. If RW is healthy and productive this season, I hope Joe continues to play kingmaker and moves him at the deadline for more future assets to pair with his youngins.

STOMP
 
blazerfan11 said:
Yeah, his blocks in every measure I've seen were career lows last season.
Click to expand...
However, looking again, i see that his rebound % has held steady over the years and is much better than his first year. So the blk % decline could be due to something besides his knees, possibly a different emphasis on defense?
 
STOMP said:
Jokic + anyone, Embiid + anyone

Williams has had multiple surgeries on his knees. Can anyone list guys who's knees went under the knife early on as much as his have and then gone on to a long productive career? Portland's young talent is years away. If RW is healthy and productive this season, I hope Joe continues to play kingmaker and moves him at the deadline for more future assets to pair with his youngins.

STOMP
Click to expand...
Embiid?
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Users who are viewing this thread

Total: 1 (members: 0, guests: 1)

Featured content

Back
Top