DON’T PASS ON BUCK!
Fordham Prep’s sports analytics club makes Hall of Fame case for former Net Williams
Shane Daughtry didn’t know much about Buck Williams before accepting the mathematical challenge of launching him into the Naismith Hall of Fame. It’s understandable. Daughtry is a teenager and senior at Fordham Prep in the Bronx, growing up well after Williams’ prime with the Nets and Trail Blazers. Also, Williams isn’t the type of player, or personality, who’d become the subject of “30 for 30s” and highlight packages for younger generations to absorb in retrospect.
He had no gimmicks and little flash. Williams was an aficionado of the underappreciated arts — rebounding and defense — and largely forgotten, which made him a perfect candidate for Daughtry’s after-school sports analytics club.
“We found out a lot of people don’t know about Buck Williams’ impact because he’s not a flashy player,” Daughtry said. “So we kind of had to be that voice for him to make himself known. A lot of his impact was on the defensive side of the ball. So we used different things like defensive win shares to show his impact on the team.”
It’s important to understand the Sports Analytics Club Program, a nationwide program with ties to the NBA, has already successfully completed similar projects. It launched Marvin Webster into the National Collegiate Hall of Fame posthumously through a program at a Baltimore school in 2018. Through students in Virginia, it elevated Ben Wallace into Naismith.
With Daughtry as a catalyst (he proposed the after-school club and presented it to the principal), Fordham Prep launched New York’s lone chapter, with seven students (mostly freshman) participating in the Hall of Fame project.
The main objective of the SACP is training the next generation of data scientists, with an emphasis on bringing diversity into the field. An ancillary reward is assisting overlooked basketball stars in their pursuit of the highest post-career honor.
Williams was pitched as Fordham Prep’s subject by SACP CEO Robert Clayton, an accomplished sports attorney in Washington D.C. who, long ago in the 1980s, tried to recruit Williams as a client. Forty years later, Clayton was pitching high school students on how to best represent Williams through numbers.
“This is a project that will be valuable to you in doing data research and analysis. And we have a player who will greatly benefit from your effort,” Clayton said. “Because the player will not get in without your effort. Because if they were going to be in without your help, they would’ve gotten in.”
On the surface, it’s a daunting task. Williams, 61, has been retired since 1999 but wasn’t nominated until this year. His traditional numbers would typically preclude Williams from Springfield, with averages of 12.8 points and 10 rebounds over 17 seasons.
His career totals, achieved through longevity, offer a better argument, especially his all-time ranking in rebounds (17th). Every retired player above Williams on that list is already in Springfield.
But Williams was only a threetime All-Star, with no appearances in his last 12 seasons. There are unlucky reasons for the lack of recognition. Williams played in an era of Mount Rushmore-level NBA forwards, competing for All-Star votes and attention with Larry Bird, Julius Erving, Karl Malone, Charles Barkley, Dominique Wilkins and Kevin McHale.
He lifted New Jersey to new heights in the ‘80s with Larry Brown and Stan Albeck as the coaches, but his teammates were unreliable (ahem, Micheal Ray Richardson) and the Nets only once advanced out the first round in Williams’ era.
His Rookie of the Year award, retired jersey, two NBA Finals appearances and Olympic selection for the boycotted 1980 Games have thus far not solidified a Naismith candidacy.
“Let’s be candid here: the game is about putting the ball in the bucket. I got close to 17,000 points so I wasn’t a slouch there but the game is about putting the ball in the basket,” Williams told the Daily News. “I just think the game is about offense and those players who have put the ball in the bucket, they’ve always gotten the upper hand when it comes to All-Star game, when it comes to the Hall of Fame.”
Fordham Prep’s club was less interested in traditional measurements of Hall of Fame credentials. The students compiled statistics for a 26-page portfolio, demonstrating how Williams stacked up favorably to seven Hall of Fame players in five statistical categories, including defensive win shares.
The comparisons were to Chris Webber, Jack Sikma, Vlade Divac, Ralph Sampson, Walt Bellamy, Bob Lanier and Nate Thurmond.
“It kept hitting us while we were doing the research — why isn’t he in the Hall?” Dr. Raymond Gonzalez, a teacher at Fordham Prep and the club’s moderator. “I don’t get it.”
Williams was ignited by the data.
“I never thought about this until these kids did a statistical analysis of my career,” he said. “I never sat and thought about these things, and then they presented it to me, and I’m like, ‘Wow.’”
Of course, Williams is an easy sell on this subject. The selection committee will be a tougher crowd to convince. The Fordham Prep students sent their findings to the Hall of Fame last month, and the North American Screening Committee can submit up to 10 finalists. Results are unveiled during All-Star Weekend on Feb. 18.
The 2022 class is considered thin and low-profile, which should boost Williams’ chances. Only Manu Ginobili is a first-ballot lock among former NBA players. Other NBA nominees include Chauncey Billups, Tom Chambers, Tim Hardaway, Mark Jackson and Marques Johnson.
If the Hall of Fame is swayed by Fordham Prep, Williams said he’d be enshrined as a Net, rather than a Trail Blazer, where he advanced to two NBA Finals alongside Clyde Drexler. It was an unnecessary pledge since Springfield doesn’t require inductees to choose a team, but Williams’ allegiance was solidified by a recent movement by the Nets to embrace their New Jersey roots and, by extension, the contributions of No. 52 in the Barclays Center rafters.
“No question (I’d go into the Hall of Fame as a Net). That’s where it all started,” Williams said. “We did some good things in
New Jersey. They’ve recognized me and now they’re inviting me back to the arena and being part of the Nets family. I like what the owner is doing there, he’s trying to win a championship. I’m always going to consider myself a Net no matter what happened in Portland. We won a lot of games, I had fun up there, had some great teammates.
But New Jersey would be the team.”
For Daughtry, the big picture is the experience of a data science project and working alongside Kelsey McDonald, the NBA’s Stats Technology Manager who assisted Fordham Prep. Daughtry’s headed to University of Pennsylvania next year as a Statistics major with longterm hopes of working for an NBA team.
But make no mistake, it’s very cool that success in this project means something life-changing happened to an underappreciated and undersized power forward.
“It would mean a ton,” Daughtry said. “It would just be an honor to just see our work would actually make a difference. He’s a player who really goes unrecognized so it would mean a lot.”