How one season on the Sixers’ staff brought Monty Williams back to coaching — and propelled him to the Suns
After his wife's death in 2016, Williams wasn't sure he was ready to go back to coaching. But a short spell on Brett Brown's staff buoyed his career.
Monty Williams’ home in the Moorestown countryside occupied 3 acres. It backed up to a horse farm, where a mom and her foal regularly strolled up to the fence. A neighbor had a pond with fish, which Williams’ sons frequented.
It was a slice of serenity as Williams began to navigate the rigors of NBA coaching again.
“It was a breath of fresh air right next to a huge city,” Williams told The Inquirer by phone last week. “It was just so peaceful out there, and it was just what I needed to get to where I am today.”
Williams’ 2018-19 season spent as an assistant on Brett Brown’s coaching staff was far more than a career flashpoint before accepting a promotion. The opportunity with the 76ers returned Williams to the bench, following two years away to take care of his grieving family after his wife, Ingrid, died from injuries sustained in a 2016 car accident in Oklahoma City. It launched him into his current job as head coach of the Phoenix Suns, who have carried their magical 2021 NBA Finals run into holding the league’s best record entering Tuesday’s showdown with the Sixers at the Wells Fargo Center.
And that season influenced many aspects of Williams’ current approach, making each visit to Philly special.
“That city means a lot to me,” Williams said, “just because it was the first city that allowed for me to get back into coaching. The ownership, the management, the coaching staff, they gave me a safe harbor to get back on my feet, because I wasn’t quite sure I was ready to do it again.”
Williams, who also played his final NBA season with the Sixers in 2002-03, was working in the San Antonio Spurs’ front office in the summer of 2018, more than two years after leaving the Oklahoma City Thunder’s staff. After getting remarried, his wife, Lisa, encouraged Williams to pursue coaching again, telling him, “This is who you are. This is what you do. You’ve got to go back and do that.”
Williams interviewed for a couple of head-coaching jobs in that cycle but was not selected. Within a couple of days, however, agent Spencer Breecker asked Williams how he would feel about being the lead assistant for Brown, whom Williams had known for almost two decades from their time together in San Antonio.
“It was a very easy conversation,” Brown told The Inquirer last week. “… I certainly believe that Monty knew that he would be empowered and trusted and really respected in an environment that [would help] grow him, too.”
Brown knew immediately that he would make Williams the manager of the Sixers’ offense. Back in 2005, Brown regularly watched a young Williams draw “some crazy stuff on the board, like, ‘Really, Mont?’ It was creatively ambitious, and I love that stuff. It’s kind of how I hope I’m wired, too.”
Brown believed Williams’ clever approach had since been combined with sage experience as the head coach in New Orleans from 2010-15, then as the associate head coach for a star-studded Thunder team.
Brown said Williams arrived in Philly as a more polished version of that coach with which he had previously worked. He also earned players’ respect with a presence that was commanding yet humble.
“Because he’s a 6-foot-8 stud and a former player, he’s got a little bit of bite to him as well as this decency thing we’re talking about,” Brown said of Williams. “Don’t be tricked, there’s a fierce competitor in a very kind man.”
Williams, meanwhile, was immediately awed by Brown’s level of organization for “every situation you could think of” in a game. That attention to detail also applied to Williams’ responsibility to set the lineup rotation sheet for each game.
Additionally, Williams valued how Brown built relationships with players, including a monthly ritual when one would speak in front of the group about a non-basketball life interest that could range from cars, to snakes, to tattoos. That concept was the inspiration for a game the Suns now play called “Who Dat?” where the staff puts a factoid about a player on the video board and teammates guess the identity.
“It’s kind of corny, but they seem to take to it,” Williams said. “We do a lot of goofy stuff in Phoenix, and I got a lot of those ideas from some of the things that Brett did in Philly.”
Williams also built strong individual bonds with current and former Sixers.
Then-rookie Landry Shamet, who was traded to the Suns last summer, was “my guy from the jump,” Williams said, to work with before and after practices. Williams had “profound” conversations with Ben Simmons and his brother, Liam, “that really impacted me.” And he remembers a time he pulled Joel Embiid into his office, drew a line on a board between a collection of all-time great players and a group of players who never reached that level, and “basically asked him who he wanted to be.”
“His acceptance of that conversation told me a lot about him,” Williams said of Embiid. “I got a chance to see the competitiveness, the killer, the desire to win. The biggest thing with Jo was he didn’t mind when I got on him. … A lot of these guys don’t really take coaching, especially on the level.
“Jo, he was pretty receptive, especially when I had to tell him the truth.”
On the staff, former Sixers assistant Kevin Young — who is now Williams’ top assistant with the Suns — appreciated Williams’ perspective as a former head coach. Young, who worked closely with Williams on the Sixers’ offense, remembers calling him one time to vent and Williams seeing the issue “from a 30,000-foot view.”
That measured approach was needed during a 2018-19 Sixers season that was a blend of success, tumult and, in the end, heartbreak.
That’s when the Sixers made in-season trades for Jimmy Butler and Tobias Harris. They finished third in the Eastern Conference with a 51-31 record before losing in Game 7 of the playoffs’ second round on Kawhi Leonard’s iconic corner shot that bounced on the rim four times before dropping through the net. Williams has shared the raw postgame emotions he experienced that night with his Suns team, which never reached a Game 7 during last season’s Finals run.
“Some of them were crying,” Williams recalled. “It was almost like they kind of knew that was the shot, and you never know if you’re going to get back there. It was pretty cool to be involved in that, because you can learn a lot in that environment.”
During that postseason, teams with head-coaching vacancies began expressing interest in Williams. He was content to stay with the Sixers because “I was learning so much. … but Brett was like, ‘Nah, dude. You’ve got to get out of here. You’ve got to go run your own program,’” Williams said.
Brown, though, wanted Williams to think about where he would best fit. Williams chose the rebuilding Suns over the Lakers anchored by LeBron James.
“Where do you feel like you can actually grow something, build something?” Brown said. “Have your six children, your beautiful new wife, Lisa, come in and raise a family and grow a community and be Monty Williams and be a pillar?
“It’s deeper than a coach. To me, he can be a face of a community, a real community leader and something a city is proud of — not just a basketball team.”
That vision has come to fruition during the Suns’ rapid renaissance, making Williams the runner-up for NBA Coach of the Year last season and the head coach of Team LeBron at All-Star Weekend in less than two weeks.
His Suns were the NBA bubble darlings, going 8-0 and barely missing the playoffs during the 2019-20 season’s restart. That set up the big-swing trade for Chris Paul, who reunited with his former coach in New Orleans and at age 36 is still a masterful point guard. The young core of All-Star guard Devin Booker, two-way center Deandre Ayton, and former Villanova standout Mikal Bridges continues to blossom. And Young, Shamet, and Dario Saric all joining the Suns at some point during Williams’ tenure has created a Philly reunion, of sorts.
While watching the Suns, Brown sees “wrinkles and winks and blinks” at what Williams acquired during his season with the Sixers. Young added he and Williams still talk about Brown’s outside-the-box ideas during Suns staff meetings, and use nearly identical terminology along with the basic shell of their “0.5″ offensive system predicated on players making quick decisions with the ball in their hands. That the Suns are the NBA’s best “clutch” team — 20-3 in games with a margin of five points or fewer with five minutes or less to play with an eye-popping plus-45.1 net rating entering Monday — offers proof that Williams is more prepared to guide his team during situational basketball.
Perhaps there is no better example than Game 2 of last season’s Western Conference finals against the Clippers. As Paul George stepped to the free-throw line with the Clippers up one point with 8.2 seconds left, Williams began diagramming a play assuming George would make both attempts. When George missed the first, Williams erased and started anew. When George missed the second, he scrubbed and drew again.
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What followed was the Jae Crowder out-of-bounds pass to Ayton for a wild, game-winning, alley-oop tip-dunk with less than a second to play — because Williams knew Ayton was allowed reach into the cylinder and touch the ball on such a play.
“Seeing him being able to apply a lot of that, combined with his previous experience, and kind of see where it’s led is pretty cool,” Young said.
Yet when Williams arrives in Philly for Tuesday’s game, he will think of former teammates such as Allen Iverson and Aaron McKie, and organizational staples such as Allen Lumpkin. He will think of the cultural melting pot of American and basketball history, and that peaceful South Jersey countryside neighborhood with the foal and the pond.
And he will think of the opportunity with the Sixers that welcomed him back to coaching, then propelled him to the Suns.
“It was almost like God was directing me to Philly,” Williams said. " ... It just happened, and [it] ended up being one of the best decisions for me, my kids, my career.”