Got your attention now? Teammates Dee Brown and Luther Head won the awards, but Deron Williams willed Illinois to the final four

Sporting News, The, April 8, 2005 by Mike DeCourcy

The campaign began after the election was conducted. That's a tough way to win it, folks. As a candidate, Deron Williams needed every endorsement he could get, every expert testimonial. His appeal was too subtle to expect that voters would rush to embrace him.

So among the three gifted players in Illinois' backcourt, Williams gained the least individual recognition for his contributions to his team's astonishing season. Dee Brown's game-changing energy helped make him the face of the Illini; he smiled from magazine covers on newsstands and was a consensus first-team All-American. As the team's leading scorer, Luther Head was easy to notice and always seemed to be a vote or two ahead of Williams.

When the Illini had a team outing at a Chicago-area Dave & Buster's restaurant last week, they heard on a television report that Brown and Head had been named second-team All-Americans by the Associated Press. The anchor did not mention Williams' selection to the third team, and coach Bruce Weber was alarmed. He immediately called Williams over and made sure he knew he'd been honored.

"I kind of apologized to him," Weber says. "I said, 'You made third.' He said, 'It doesn't matter. We're winning. [ don't have the numbers to make those teams.'" The next day, Weber escalated the offensive, publicly calling Williams the team's MVP. It was just a little late for that.

America needs guidance. It is hard to choose the best player among Williams, Brown and Head. Williams is averaging 12.6 points and shooting 43.6 percent--nice numbers but hardly overwhelming. And those figures are up sharply after his spectacular second weekend of the NCAA Tournament, in which Williams averaged 21.5 points and shot 59.3 percent in two games. He was named the Chicago Region's most outstanding player. He will take that award above all others because he won it while helping deliver Illinois to the Final Four.

"A point guard is judged on wins and losses," he says. "I think I'm doing a good job."

Seems Williams also needs work on his campaign speeches.

Down 15 points with a little more than 4 minutes left in the region championship against Arizona, the Illini took turns trying to convince one another they still could win. There were plenty of admonitions about refusing to quit, playing hard to the end. Some players admitted they simply wanted to end the season with a flourish, figuring a victory might be impossible.

Williams is not a mouthy guy. For such a commanding leader, a player Weber calls, "the captain of our ship," he is secure in letting Brown handle a lot of the vocal stuff. But Williams' teammates recognized he was not about to relent. "He just had the look in his eyes.... He was not going to let us lose," says reserve forward Jack Ingram. "Every shot that he took, he believed it was going in. So I believed it was going in."

In the final 9 minutes of the win over Arizona, including an overtime period, Illinois scored 30 points. Williams scored 14 of those. His assists led to another 10 points. Nearly everything that happened, Williams had a hand in.

"Any open look he got, he didn't care--he was going to take it," says Arizona point guard Mustafa Shakur. "The game was on the line. He hit some impossible shots--a couple steps behind the line, with a hand in his face."

The most consequential of Williams' shots came with 39 seconds left in regulation and Illinois down by three. Arizona attempted to inbound the ball, but Ingram deflected the pass, knocking it toward Head. He got the ball to Brown, who zipped it to Williams, who drilled a long-range jumper near the top of the key. "When he released that 3, I knew it was going in," Weber says. "He took his time. He set himself. A lot of people, you get a game like that, so hectic and chaotic, they throw up bad shots. He kept his composure."

The most amazing thing about that shot, and all the other heroics surrounding it, was that Williams had the energy to finish strong after he had spent most of the game hounding Salim Stoudamire. Stoudamire is a scorer so dangerous and unpredictable that Brown says he shoots "like he's playing a video game." Williams' defense held Stoudamire to 2-of-13 shooting. When Arizona forward Hassan Adams tried to conjure a game-winning play in the final 10 seconds of overtime, it was Williams who stood in his path and prevented Adams from trying anything more harmful than an off-balance throw.

Earlier in the year, Weber had goaded Williams about allowing his defense to slide as he focused on enhancing his offensive game. "He kind of got mad at me," Williams says. "I didn't think it was serious, but he did. We had a couple arguments." With Head, the team's top defender, bothered by a hamstring injury, Williams became the choice to challenge Stoudamire. Excelling in the role but picking up a couple of fouls in the process, Williams beseeched Weber not to change his assignment.

"He said to us, 'Leave me on him. Don't let somebody else let him get going,'" Weber says. "Stoudamire's good. He's a freak. You watch film, and he does things no one else does. We just never let him get in a rhythm."