Scott Fowler: Wait, Mark Williams played 29 minutes in win over Lakers? I thought he failed a physical.

Scott Fowler, The Charlotte Observer on Feb 20, 2025

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CHARLOTTE, N.C. — For a guy who failed his physical, Mark Williams sure looked pretty healthy Wednesday night for the Charlotte Hornets.

Williams was in his first game back for the Hornets after being traded to the Los Angeles Lakers, only for the Lakers to say “never mind” and rescind the trade once they took a good look at Williams at the doctor’s office. And fittingly, it was against those same Lakers that Williams played that first game — and wound up doing just fine — as Charlotte upset L.A., 100-97.

“It was crazy,” Williams told The Charlotte Observer’s Roderick Boone in Los Angeles afterward. “I’m just happy to be back playing.”

Williams played 29 minutes and contributed 10 points and nine rebounds to the Hornets’ victory. Dalton Knecht, who was going to be sent to Charlotte in the deal but ended up back in L.A., had less effect on the game. Knecht only played 13 minutes, went 1 for 5 from the floor and ended up with three points and five rebounds.

That doesn’t mean the Hornets “won” this non-trade, of course. It just means Charlotte — still mired near the bottom of the NBA at 14-39 — won one game they weren’t supposed to win. From a long-term perspective, the draft-pick compensation attached to the deal was probably the most valuable part of it, and that’s now gone away.

But you had to feel for Williams on Wednesday. Here the former Duke star was playing for a team that — for a while — didn’t want him, against another team that definitely didn’t want him after first acting like it did. His Charlotte teammates and coaches, at least, tried to make his re-integration back into the Hornets as seamless as possible.

“We wanted to win that game for Mark and we did,” Charlotte’s Miles Bridges said afterward. “So now he probably has a sense of confidence that we want him back. It’s kind of hard being in that situation where you don’t know if you are on one team or the other team, thinking both teams don’t want you. So for us to welcome him with open arms I feel like is big and it’s going to go a long way.”

The game itself started slowly and was paid attention to by more NBA fans than usual. Because it was originally supposed to have been played in January but was postponed due to the California wildfires, it was the only contest in the league Wednesday night. It also featured the starry Lakers (32-21), with LeBron James and Luka Doncic, as well as Charlotte’s LaMelo Ball (fresh off his All-Star snub) making his return to his home state.

LeBron was terrific to keep the Lakers in it, scoring 16 of his 26 points in the fourth quarter. But he ended up missing two 3-point attempts in the final five seconds that would have sent the game to overtime. Luka was mostly a dud, shooting 5 of 18 with six turnovers.

And it was Melo who finally won the game, making one key play after another in the fourth quarter and finishing with 27 points and six assists.

It wasn’t all roses for Charlotte or its return-to-sender center. You could even say that Williams failed another physical when he got absolutely posterized by a LeBron tomahawk dunk, one that left the arena rocking and LeBron’s son Bronny putting his hands on his head in disbelief. Williams tried to defend the play, unsuccessfully, and instead made the wrong side of the highlight film.

But LeBron has done that sort of thing to other people for 20 years, and he’s still doing it at age 40. Williams at least attempted to block it; 90% of NBA players would have simply stepped aside when they saw the LeBron freight train coming at them.

Before the game, Williams had spoken at greater length about his return to The Observer. He said he had been shocked when the Lakers called off the trade (Williams has missed nearly 60% of games in his three-year NBA career due to various injuries, mostly back- and foot-related, but was supposed to be completely healthy at the time of the trade).

“My agent told me,” Williams said. “I didn’t think I had failed my physical. That didn’t even cross my mind. The night I got traded I played hella minutes. I didn’t think in any world that was possible. Since I’ve been back since the start of the year, I’ve played games with a lot of minutes. I feel like every injury I’ve had has been well-documented and I’ve recovered and been 100 percent since. So, I don’t know what went into that decision. I think that’s up to them (the Lakers).”

The Lakers, though, apparently believed the 23-year-old Williams was an injury time bomb — that it was only a matter of games before another injury sidelined him again.

We won’t know the answer to that for a while. But on Wednesday, Williams was back. The Hornets won.

And no matter what you thought about the trade, you had to feel happy for the man in the middle of it.