The Five Stages Of Cody Williams Left Utah Scarred

The only thing less rewarding than watching Cody Williams play basketball was holding to the hope that he could develop into a talented NBA-level contributor.

The second lottery pick of the tanking era, the Utah Jazz selected Williams with the 10th overall pick in what was a putrid NBA Draft class. We knew it would be a comparatively garbage crop of talent — you could smell the stench months in advance — yet Utahns still celebrated Williams’ selection at the time.

A former 5-star McDonald’s All-American with an elastic wingspan, a 41.5% clip from three-point land in his freshman season at Colorado, and stardom in his DNA, Williams was a great proposition at that point in the draft. In theory, he was a low-danger prospect dredged from a draft pool of filth.

In practice, however, it took no time at all for Jazz fans to wallow in the melancholy of a rebuild apparently prolonged for yet another season.

He was incredibly disappointing in his first two years with the Jazz, posting stat lines that should be buried in the archives, far away from the eyes of impressionable, vulnerable youth.

Cody Williams Rookie Stats:

21.6 minutes
4.6 points
1.2 assists
2.3 rebounds
0.5 steals
0.3 blocks
0.9 turnovers
32.3% FG
25.9% 3PT

Cody Williams Sophomore Stats:

24.3 minutes (+2.7)
8.8 points (+4.2)
2.0 assists (+0.8)
3.0 rebounds (+0.7)
0.8 steals (+0.3)
0.4 blocks (+0.1)
1.1 turnovers (+0.2)
46.8% FG (+14.5%)
21.4% 3PT (-4.5%)

Williams isn’t the worst basketball player ever, nor should he be treated as a villain or disease that must be eradicated. I tend to exaggerate for effect.

In fact, I have long been a supporter of Williams. Call it homerism, blind optimism, or poor player evaluation skills, but I still believe that there’s a world in which Williams develops into a good or even great piece of a competitive team.

He’s still only 21 years old. And though the “young = good” fallacy is still prevalent in NBA circles, I still believe that given the right training and plenty of patience, Cody Williams has the potential to be an effective NBA-level player. Patience runs thin at the highest level of basketball, and the Jazz apparently burned through their supply when they dealt Williams for a role player and a stack of bills.

The Jazz saw him in practice. They saw him in games. They had seen enough, and they quit on the second lottery pick of the post-Gobert-Mitchell era just seven months after trading Taylor Hendricks.

The key difference between the Hendricks and Williams trades? Hendricks played a key role in bringing Jaren Jackson Jr. — a multiple-time All-Star and former Defensive Player of the Year — to Utah. Williams yielded Josh Green, a player suspected to be little more than a situational outside weapon in the short-term and a tradable contract in the long-term.

Not exactly a resume-builder.

Though it spanned just two seasons, the era of Cody Williams dug up feelings in his supporters akin to the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Please allow this article to serve as a therapy session. A moment of safety from the harsh realities of Utah Jazz basketball in the past 24 calendar page flips or so, and a calming gulp of oxygen as we move toward a better future.

The Five Stages of Cody Williams

Denial

On draft day, Cody Williams was seen as an underwhelming but promising prospect. He has fantastic measurables, standing at 6’8” with a 7’1” wingspan; he fit comfortably into the archetype of a modern NBA wing. Toss into the mix the fact that Williams hit 41.5% of his three-pointers at Colorado, and it seemed all he needed to transform into a dependable 3-and-D player was a few hundred hours in the weight room.

As unrefined as his game still was, Williams was always going to be a project. Surely, given enough time, he could gain the physicality and ball skills of his older brother, Jalen, right?

Anger

It didn’t take long before Williams’ uninspiring production frustrated Jazz fans, many of whom (Williams’ ride-or-die supporters) clung to denial while the remainder slipped into the second phase.

He was bad as a rookie (dubbed the worst player in the NBA by some) and not much better as a sophomore.

He had basically fallen out of Will Hardy’s rotation in the early stages of his sophomore season, never leaving the bench in 5 of the first 14 games of the season. Cody had visibly lost all confidence in his jump shot, and for good reason — 21.4% is an abysmal three-point rate for a wing, and even worse for a player who knocked down a sizzling rate from distance in college.

…On just 1.7 attempts per game. That’s a low sample size that might have been a bit deceptive for Utah’s scouts, considering 41.5% looks much more appealing than 0.7 made three-pointers per game. Now shooting more than that at the NBA level, Williams can’t seem to find the net on open looks (he gets plenty of those).

He just scored 35 points in a G League game — where is that guy when he suits up for the Jazz?

The Jazz could have just gone the safe route and taken Matas Buzelis. Heck, Isaiah Collier and Kyle Filipowski are outplaying Williams, and they were drafted 20 picks later.

It seems the Jazz had been fooled or simply missed in the 2024 NBA Draft lottery.

Bargaining

But he’s not even a real top-10 pick anyway, right? After all, his draft class was atrocious. Remember Zaccharie Risacher? Tijaun Salaun? Reed Sheppard? Rob Dillingham? These were all top-10 picks, and none of them have behaved as such since entering the NBA. The number-one overall pick, Risacher, was unceremoniously traded from Atlanta this offseason, and it wasn’t headline news in the slightest.

When you think about it in this frame of mind, Cody Williams isn’t a true top-10 prospect when compared to prospects typically in his draft range. He’s a project, after all, so it would be unrealistic to expect him to play well in just his second season.

These are the lies we told ourselves. These are the rationalizations we voluntarily internalized to protect ourselves from the truth that we expected more from a lottery pick.

We celebrated every routine positive. Praised him for making the right play on defense or for dunking when he had a gently obstructed runway to the basket. Williams wasn’t what we hoped, so we moved the goalposts to qualify him as a success, even if unknowingly.

Depression

In his third year at the Summer League, he was still a non-factor. Look at who AJ Dybantsa has to keep help defense at bay: Tre Johnson and Will Reily have been awesome during the Summer League.

Yet with Darryn Peterson claiming the defense’s attention, and against lesser competition, Cody Williams still shrank. He crept in the shadows. He was timid, cautious, and sickeningly irrelevant on the court.

It all came to a head when he posted a zero-point effort in 23 minutes of playing time. This was rock bottom for those still holding to the tattered remains of their Cody Williams stock. Dejected, sobbing, and crumpled into a heap on the concrete, we clenched our fists upon understanding what we saw wasn’t a larval stage of his development — it was an unforgiving telegram from reality.

Acceptance

This didn’t fully arrive until he was dealt to Minnesota.

Discarded for a bench wing who scored fewer than 5 points per game last season, Cody Williams was packaged with John Konchar in a trade that sent the pair to Minnesota.

Maybe Cody Williams will become a shade of the player many hoped he could become in Utah. The T-Wolves could have a plan to dig out the perfect version of the 21-year-old wing, and that perfect version may come back to haunt the Jazz in the years to come. Maybe.

But in Utah, the nightmare is over now. You’re safe. The Utah Jazz have traded Cody Williams, and he cannot hurt you anymore.

Calvin Barrett is the Associate Editor for SLC Dunk. Originally from Springville, Utah, he currently lives in Japan and has covered the NBA and college athletics since 2024.