Colin Cowherd On Zion Williamson As The Future Of The NBA

We learned this week that some people expect Zion Williamson to “shock” the NBA when play resumes.

For his part, Williamson confirmed that he’s been working hard and taking advantage of the time to get stronger and to rehab his knee.

One guy who’s not likely to be shocked? Colin Cowherd.

He’s not always our favorite broadcaster, but Cowherd understood Williamson a lot sooner than many of his colleagues.

Some time ago he said about Williamson that “[t]op 50, of course he’s a top 50 player. The question is whether he’s a top 20 basketball player in the world.”

You might remember a while back that we linked to an article bemoaning the simultaneous decline of great wings in America just as they are turning up everywhere else.

Williamson alone reverses that trend and if he chooses to play on the Olympic team, he presents an obstacle that no one can deal with.

But back to Cowherd, who now says this, and again he’s perceptive and a bit ahead of others when it comes to Williamson:

If you look around the NBA today, who’s the next star? You gotta be kind of cool. You gotta have charisma. You gotta have a personality...Folks, Zion is the face of the league. He got a million people to watch a high school game. He took Duke’s always strong ratings, moved them up 35 percent. He set an NBA Summer League television record. You gotta have the look, the smile, the style, the power, the form, the ‘it.’ That’s why he has been jammed into the playoffs. That is why they decided on the larger number of teams to come back. One reason: Zion, the next face of the NBA.”

That’s pretty well reasoned. It didn't take us long to figure out what a different sort of player he is and he’s the presumptive face of NBA2K21 after just 19 games. It is amazing though that they’re already looking at him as the future of the game.