Road to Duke
The kid the Memphis press corps kept calling "the next Penny Hardaway" did not actually grow up in the rough parts of Memphis the way Penny did. Elliot Jerell Williams went to St. George's Independent School in Collierville, Tennessee — a small private school in the affluent Memphis suburbs, more known for tennis and lacrosse than for producing top-20 basketball recruits. He was an academic standout there, the kind of kid who played chess and pulled a high GPA and didn't make trouble. He just happened to also be 6-foot-5, left-handed, and one of the most explosive guards in his entire high school class.
Williams was born June 20, 1989, the son of Mexwayne and Delois Williams. He had two older brothers, Max and Antwaun, and an older sister, Erica Tamayo. His mother was the gravity of the household. "My dad and my parents clown me because they say I'm a mama's boy," Williams said years later. "But to be honest with you, my mom — she's so special to me in my life. She's done so much for me and done so much with me."
He averaged 26.2 points per game as a sophomore at St. George's, then 25.1 as a junior while leading his team to the Tennessee Division II-A state championship game. By his senior year he was the Division II-A Mr. Basketball in Tennessee, a Parade Second-Team All-American, and one of 24 boys named to the 2008 McDonald's All-American Game in Milwaukee, where he scored 10 points for the East team in a 107–102 win. Rivals.com ranked him the No. 3 shooting guard in the country and the No. 16 overall player in the entire 2008 class. Scout had him 16th overall as well. ESPN had him 18th. Every recruiting service agreed: Elliot Williams was a five-star.
The recruitment came down to Duke, Memphis, Virginia, and Tennessee. Memphis was the obvious one — his hometown school, John Calipari was at the height of his powers there, the Tigers were a Final Four program. But on November 25, 2007, Williams signed his National Letter of Intent with Duke. "When it was all said and done, it was Duke that offered the most things they were looking for," his St. George's coach Jeff Ruffin told The Commercial Appeal.
What he didn't know — what nobody outside the family knew — was that his mother had already been diagnosed with breast cancer. The disease had arrived in 2006, two years before he committed to Duke. The Williamses had decided to keep it private. Delois insisted Elliot go chase the dream. Mike Krzyzewski had no idea, when he signed him, that the clock was already ticking.
At Duke
The 2008–09 Blue Devils were a team in transition. Gerald Henderson and Kyle Singler were the stars, Jon Scheyer and Greg Paulus were sharing the point, and Coach K had brought in Williams and Olek Czyz as his lone freshmen. Williams was billed as the most athletic player on the roster. He needed to be — Duke was being criticized by national writers for lacking exactly the kind of slashing, get-to-the-rim guard that Williams had been on the AAU circuit.
The freshman season was a slow burn. For the first 25 games Williams came off the bench, learning Krzyzewski's defensive schemes, watching Henderson, taking limited shots. Then in late February, with the team scuffling, Coach K reshuffled. Paulus came out of the starting lineup. Scheyer slid to the point. Nolan Smith was repositioned. And Williams started getting starts. He started 11 of Duke's final 12 games, including all six postseason games.
The team responded. Duke caught fire and won the 2009 ACC Tournament championship, beating Florida State in the final. Williams was on the floor for it. They advanced to the Sweet Sixteen of the NCAA Tournament before falling to Villanova in the East Region semifinal. Williams's stat line for the year — 4.2 points and 2.3 rebounds in 16.6 minutes per game across 34 games — undersold what the staff thought of him. Behind the scenes Krzyzewski was telling people Williams was about to become a star. Duke was going to be Williams's team in 2009–10.
And then the phone rang.
It was June 2009. Delois called from Memphis. She wouldn't tell her son everything over the phone, but she told him enough. The cancer was bad. He needed to come home. Williams later told reporters his mother would never have made that call unless it was dire. He didn't think twice. He packed his bags and walked into the Duke basketball offices to ask Krzyzewski for a release.
K gave it to him without hesitation. "Our thoughts and prayers go out to Elliot and his family," Krzyzewski said in the official Duke press release on June 24, 2009. "We fully support him in his efforts to be closer to them during this trying time. He is a good young man with an opportunity to become an outstanding player. We wish him well as he determines his future. He will always be a part of our program and we will always be in his corner."
That last sentence is what programs say when they don't actually mean it. Krzyzewski meant it. Williams's name has been kept on Duke's roster pages and in the record books in good standing ever since. He's listed in goduke.com bios. He's invited to alumni events. The release was clean and the door was left open and Mike Krzyzewski never said a single negative word, publicly or privately, about a player walking away from his program after one year — which is its own kind of statement about the program K built.
Williams went home. The NCAA, recognizing the family medical hardship, granted him an immediate eligibility waiver — no transfer year required. Newly hired Memphis head coach Josh Pastner, who had taken over the Tigers job from John Calipari just months earlier, suddenly found himself with a five-star Duke transfer on his hands. "If Elliot Williams had walked in front of me I would not have known who he was," Pastner admitted. "I knew he played at Duke for a couple games the year before. But I'm here at Memphis, not watching the Duke games."
What Pastner got was a transformed player. Free of the depth chart at Duke, free to be Memphis's go-to scorer, playing fifteen minutes from his mother's hospital, Williams blossomed. He started all 34 games for the Tigers as a sophomore. He averaged 17.9 points, 4.0 rebounds, and 3.8 assists per game. He scored in double figures in 32 of 34 games, including a stretch of seven straight 20-point games from November through December. His 610 points were the second-most by a sophomore in Memphis history, trailing only Elliot Perry. Only three players in Memphis history had ever scored 600+ in their first season as a Tiger: Omar Sneed, Dajuan Wagner, and Tyreke Evans. Williams became the fourth. He was named C-USA Newcomer of the Year — the first Tiger ever to win that award — and First-Team All-Conference USA.
And his mother made every home game.
"Delois has her good days and her bad days, but still has made every Memphis home game this season," the New Orleans Times-Picayune reported in February 2010. "She still cooks him meals — including his favorite, spaghetti." Williams told the paper that basketball had become a kind of refuge from the slow grief of watching his mother fight: "When you're playing the game it helps you focus and not think so much about the trouble that's going on. It's done a lot for me this year, playing basketball, I'm enjoying it."
After the season, with his draft stock rising fast, Williams declared for the 2010 NBA Draft. On June 24, 2010 — exactly one year to the day after his Duke release — the Portland Trail Blazers selected him with the 22nd overall pick in the first round. The photo from draft night, of Elliot and Delois crying together when his name was called, is the one he says he will never forget.
After Duke
It is hard to write this part without it sounding cruel.
The summer of 2010, before he had played a single NBA minute, Williams bumped his right knee in a pre-draft workout for the San Antonio Spurs. The injury kept him out of the Las Vegas Summer League. Then on November 3, 2010, during a routine court conditioning drill at the Trail Blazers' practice facility, his right patella dislocated. The team announced surgery. Williams missed his entire rookie season — which would have been the 2010–11 season — recovering from operations on both knees.
He was 21 years old and had not played a single NBA regular-season game.
He came back the next year. The 2011–12 season was lockout-shortened, but Williams worked himself into the rotation, made his NBA debut, and played 24 games for Portland. He was averaging 3.7 points in 6.2 minutes per game, but the per-36 numbers — he was scoring 21.3 points per 36 minutes on 50% shooting — had Blazers fans whispering about the kind of player they thought they'd drafted. His best game came February 21, 2012, against the Spurs: 17 points in 17 minutes on 7-of-10 shooting. "A year ago, at this time, I couldn't even walk," Williams said that month, looking back on the patella surgery.
Three weeks later, on March 8, 2012, he dislocated his left shoulder during practice. Surgery on March 30. Season over.
He had a summer to recover. Then in September 2012, in a voluntary offseason workout at the Trail Blazers' practice facility, Williams tore his left Achilles tendon. The third season-ending injury. The third surgery in 24 months. The Blazers waived him.
"While rehabilitating his Achilles," HuffPost would later write, "his mom died due to complications from cancer." Delois Edwards Williams passed away on April 3, 2013, at age 54. She is buried at Memorial Park Cemetery in Memphis. Elliot was 23 years old and rehabbing his third major surgery in three years.
"That was the toughest blow for me," Williams said in a 2015 interview. "That's a situation where it's hard to come out of. You lose that one person, forget basketball, forget that — I lost my mother. That's something, initially, I was hurt bad."
What he did next is the part of the story that should not be skipped. He kept playing.
He signed with Cleveland in September 2013. He was waived on October 25. The Philadelphia 76ers signed him in November and gave him 24 games — his most productive NBA stretch, 6.0 points in 17.3 minutes per game. They waived him before the next season started. In November 2014 the Santa Cruz Warriors of the NBA D-League selected him second overall in the D-League draft, and Elliot Williams started building a different career one ten-day contract at a time. The 2014–15 season alone, he was signed and waived by the Utah Jazz, the Charlotte Hornets, and the New Orleans Pelicans — three NBA call-ups, three returns to Santa Cruz. He averaged 21.3 points per game in the D-League that season. He led Santa Cruz to its first championship in franchise history. He was named 2015 NBA D-League Finals MVP after dropping 23 points, 5 rebounds and 5 assists in the Game 2 clincher against the Fort Wayne Mad Ants.
"Elliot deserves to be in the NBA," his Santa Cruz coach Casey Hill said, "and he's gonna get his shot if he keeps playing this way." Hill called him "the motor of the team" and added: "Elliot just loves basketball. It doesn't matter what gym he's playing in. He's always going to play the same way and put the same amount of effort in."
The 2015–16 season is when Elliot Williams the basketball player and Elliot Williams the human being seemed to come closest to peace. He won D-League Player of the Month in November. He set the Santa Cruz Warriors franchise scoring record with 48 points in a double-overtime win over the Rio Grande Valley Vipers on January 23, 2016 — fifteen for fifteen on twos that he could just get to whenever he wanted, fifteen of sixteen at the free throw line. He earned a 10-day contract with the hometown Memphis Grizzlies, came in as a Memphis kid playing for the Memphis franchise, and made his Grizzlies debut against Denver. The contract expired and the Grizzlies declined to keep him. He went back to Santa Cruz, made his second straight D-League All-Star team, and then in February 2016 took the final professional risk of his career: he signed with Panathinaikos in Athens, Greece.
Panathinaikos is one of the most storied basketball clubs in Europe. The fans are religious about it. Williams played 10 EuroLeague games and 17 Greek League games for them in the spring of 2016, averaging 13.1 points in EuroLeague play in 26.3 minutes per game. He scored 19 against Darüşşafaka in March. Panathinaikos made the Greek League Finals against Olympiacos. New head coach Argyris Pedoulakis abruptly cut Williams's minutes during the title series — he averaged less than seven minutes per game in the Finals — and Panathinaikos lost. Williams posted a farewell message on Instagram: "Want to thank all of the fans and supporters for an unbelievable first experience in Europe. The passion here in Greece for basketball is unreal. Looking forward to big things in the future. #PAO"
In September 2016 the Golden State Warriors signed him to a partially-guaranteed contract. He was the kind of D-League success story Golden State had been hunting for years — the next C.J. McCollum, the next Seth Curry. He didn't make the team. The Warriors waived him before the regular season began.
That was the end of it. Elliot Williams never signed another professional contract. He was 27 years old. His NBA career, the one Portland had drafted in the first round and built injury comebacks around, had been 109 total games over six calendar years. He'd missed three full seasons. He'd had four major surgeries. His career averages were 4.9 points, 1.5 rebounds, and 0.9 assists per game. He'd earned roughly $4.6 million in NBA salary across all of it. His Basketball-Reference page records his last NBA game as April 13, 2016, with the Memphis Grizzlies — back home, in his city, in front of his father.
He had given basketball everything basketball asked of him. Basketball, in return, had given him a knee, then another knee, then a shoulder, then an Achilles, then his mother gone, then a championship in the D-League, then a thunderous welcome in Athens, and then nothing more.
Where Is He Now
Elliot Williams is in his mid-thirties, lives quietly in Memphis, and is no longer in basketball. The body that was supposed to carry him to a long NBA career — the body that left Duke after one season to be closer to his ailing mother, the body that was drafted 22nd overall by the Trail Blazers, the body that the Memphis Grizzlies hoped would be their hometown success story — gave out in stages across an eight-year professional career that ended with two knee surgeries, a shoulder reconstruction, a torn Achilles, the death of his mother, and one championship in the D-League that the basketball world barely noticed.
After his last NBA game in April 2016, he went to Europe and played for Panathinaikos in the EuroLeague — the only Greek club whose home games are routinely described, by the players who experience them, as the loudest sports environment on earth. He played one season in Athens. He came home. He did not announce a retirement, did not give a farewell interview, did not appear on a Memphis sports talk-radio broadcast to reflect on the career. The career simply ended.
What is undocumented in the public record is what Elliot Williams has been doing in the years since. He surfaces occasionally in Memphis basketball-community contexts, the kind of city-native NBA veteran who pops up at AAU games and church-league exhibitions and youth basketball tournaments but who has not built a public-facing post-playing career as a coach or broadcaster or businessman. He has remained, since 2017, deeply private.
The Brotherhood records what is documented. He gave Duke one season as a sophomore transfer from Memphis to be closer to his mother. He gave Memphis a Memphis-Tigers career that he wished had ended differently. He gave the NBA a career that was supposed to be longer and gave the EuroLeague a stretch that he wished his body had let him sustain. He gave his mother every minute she needed from him in the years before she died. The Brotherhood, when it asks the question of what Elliot Williams owes anyone, finds the answer is nothing. He has already given basketball, and his family, and Memphis, every minute he had.