NCAA Basketball: 10 best bets to win 2021-22 Naismith Player of the Year

Mark Williams +10000

April Headline: Coach K Retirement Tour Sells Out, but Is Williams the Headliner?

A long shot at 100-1 on WynnBET, Mark Williams enters his sophomore campaign after an up-and-down freshman season. Let me rephrase that. Mark Williams enters his sophomore campaign after a down-then-very-up freshman season.

On the surface, Williams’ season doesn’t look like anything special. The 7’0”, 240 lb. center averaged just 7.1 PPG and 4.5 RPG. Those unimpressive stats don’t tell the whole story, however. Whether the weird COVID offseason before last season negatively impacted him or he just needed some extra time to grow into a threat for Duke, Williams did not record twenty minutes in a game until mid-February, and even then, it was inconsistent. In Duke’s first seventeen games, Williams played less than ten minutes nine times and was held scoreless six times.

Here’s the kicker… In Duke’s last six games, Williams averaged 28.0 MPG, 16.7 PPG, and 7.8 RPG. If we want to take an even smaller sample size, he put up 23 points and 19 rebounds in a win against Louisville in Duke’s last ACC Tournament game before COVID prematurely ended their season. He looked like an entirely different player in the last couple weeks of the season which is extremely encouraging for the Blue Devils.

I expect Williams to pick up where he left off with a newfound confidence and another year of experience. I’m also believing the Duke and Coach K Farewell Tour hype this season. Williams and Paolo Banchero should be enough of a formidable 1-2 punch to keep Duke in the top-15 all year and keep a ton of attention on Duke.

While this is an obvious longshot, I do believe Williams will be a beast this year and has a shot at the award if last year’s small sample size is any indication of who he is as a player and if Duke is awesome. Remember, no team will garner more media attention than the Blue Devils with it being Coach K’s last year.