Corey Williams is keeping it real and helping the NBL breakthrough

Corey Williams has lived several basketball lifetimes. Now he’s bringing his edge and energy to Australia’s NBL, helping the league breakout.

This past December, Corey Williams turned his iPhone into selfie mode and recorded an Instagram story for his 54,000-plus followers. Williams, who provides commentary for Australia’s National Basketball League, insists that he never intends to disrespect anyone, but he can’t help his natural bluntness, and the subject of this three-minute verbal barrage was Andrew Bogut, a former top pick in the NBA draft, ex-Golden State Warrior, and the starting center for the Sydney Kings — a team that had just lost back-to-back NBL games.

“A lot of you fans haven’t played professional basketball, so you don’t know how it feels as a point guard…to get a screen and get no help,” he explained. “Andrew Bogut sits with his head underneath the basket, which gives that offensive player the ability to turn the corner and get a free look…four quarters of getting free hits to your left and right ribcage, c’mon man.” Before Williams signed off, he added, “[Bogut] looks around talking about we not playing defense — it’s you not playing defense.”

Two days later, Williams doubled-down on his critique of Bogut’s defense during NBL Overtime, a weekly highlight show with a format that mimics that of TNT’s Inside the NBA. “Bogut is just playing too deep in his coverage,” Williams said to his two co-hosts. “This is good defense in AAU basketball…I’m not saying he has to step up out of the paint [but] step out a little bit and give your teammate some time. If I’m one of those [Sydney] guards, I’m pissed off.”

“People think I talk a lot of trash — I’m not, I’m dead serious about this.”

Williams isn’t a telegenic blowhard for whom the camera offers a daily fix of vanity. He doesn’t consider his opinions to be canon simply because he is afforded a platform to broadcast those thoughts to millions. For Williams, authenticity is what matters most — he can “keep it real,” in his words, because he is a former NBL MVP. He doesn’t have to sugarcoat his opinions because he already put in the work, winning a D League title with the Dakota Wizards while dropping buckets on NBA guards each summer, including a game in which he scored 26 points on Metta World Peace, then the NBA’s best defensive player. And while the 40-something still hears, ‘Who the hell does Corey think he is?,’ the vast majority of the NBL’s players, coaches, and fanbase realize that Williams is the most relevant and interesting personality working in the hoops ecosphere at the moment. “To me, this isn’t a gimmick,” he says. “I left the court, got a suit, and jumped into commentary. I know the role I play, and what I need to do.”

Every successful NBA commentator has a foil — Craig Sager and Kevin Garnett begat Charles Barkley and Draymond Green — but Williams’s critique of Bogut seemed more personal. Left unsaid during that social media story was the history between the two — ribbing during the 2019 NBL season (Williams said the Kings would never win an NBL title unless Bogut stopped chasing stats) had given way to a full-out media war. Just a few weeks prior, Williams claimed that Bogut had hired a private investigator to “find out information about” him — to which the big tweeted that the NBL announcer would “[stink] of alcohol” prior to shootarounds. “When …  a loudmouth American guy is coming down talking all kinds of rubbish, you don’t like it,” Williams told reporters.

In spite of the messy back-and-forth, Williams’s stance enthralled NBL fans, with one posting on Reddit, “The NBL needs a guy to fire off hot takes and get people talking about the league…[and] no one would be talking about this if Homicide didn’t put himself out there.”

When I ask Williams about Bogut, as well as his various controversies with other NBL players — he has similarly drawn the ire of Sydney’s Casper Ware and Bryce Cotton of the Perth Wildcats — he is adamant: there is a purpose to his verbal jabs. “I want players to give me the best version of themselves when they hit the court,” he says, “so I’m like your big brother from a distance. If Casper or Bryce is pissed off and ready to bust ass, what does that do? It levels up their game, it levels up the quality of the overall game up, and it levels up the league.”

He adds, “I’m that one person who keeps it real.” (Ware’s declined to comment through his agent. Cotton’s representative never responded to inquiries.)

According to a source familiar with Williams’s thinking, though, it’s less that the now fourth-year commentator, now in his fourth year,  enjoys his role as the NBL’s heel, and more that he realizes those sharp opinions are necessary if the league is going to sustain any growth: “He’s not worried about the average basketball fan—the NBL is behind rugby, cricket, and the AFL, and is tied with soccer, so he talks to the fan who may be on the fence to turn the game to soccer. When he and Bogut go at it, it hits the papers, and people look for him to say things.”

“People think I talk a lot of trash — I’m not, I’m dead serious about this.”

Indeed, Williams and the NBL are intertwined. When Williams began commentating, the NBL was a vastly different product, a second-rate destination for top non-NBA talent. But the NBL has transformed into arguably the top launching pad for NBA hopefuls looking for a call-up, or talent on the cusp of basketball superstardom. This past season, both Lamelo Ball and R.J. Hampton — two of America’s highest-ranking recruits — forfeited their freshman seasons on a college campus and instead played for the Illawarra Hawks and the New Zealand Breakers, respectively; as part of a “Next Stars” partnership, which connects NBA lottery hopefuls with an NBL franchise (Terrance Ferguson and Brian Bowen II are past participants). Both Ball and Hampton are poised to shake NBA commissioner Adam Silver’s hand this June. “The draw for some of these players, whether they are imports or Next Stars, is that they and the people around them, look at the NBL as a mini-NBA,” says Liam Santamaria, an ex-NBL player and Williams’ NBL Overtime co-host.

He adds, “This isn’t going to be a foreign experience, even if they’re playing in another country, and when they see Corey, it’s just another of making the league comfortable.”

Williams has established himself as the league’s dominant shining voice at just the right moment — not only has ESPN aired nearly sixty NBL games this season, but the introduction and development of media-savvy budding superstars like Ball and Hampton has enticed even the casual NBA consumer. And that consumer is already conditioned to embrace the Bayless-Smith-Rose vibe that Williams brings to his commentary. But even for curious Aussies, Williams is at a comfortable precipice — a known quality advocating for a league with increasingly high standards.  “Let me be the advocate for the hottest league in the world,” he says. “I call it as I see it, and I’m not going to be diplomatic. That sugar-coating nonsense — that’s gone.”

The 2020 NBL Finals began last week, the third Williams has commentated on since returning to the country where he played several seasons, and he immediately introduced drama to a four-team playoff that needed little: down double-digits, the Kings staged a comeback against the Melbourne United in the waning minutes, and the game was immediately lauded as a win of miraculous proportions. Williams took a different viewpoint: sitting in his hotel wearing a plush grey robe, the commentator ripped into the United. “Time clock score possessions…those same shots you missed, and you took when you came down off one pass — you can get those same shots at the end of the shot clock…That is not the greatest comeback in an NBL game. That is the greatest choke.”

As his colleague, Santamaria says, “There is no one else like Corey Williams over here covering the other sports the way he does.”

“I’d go to their parks and win in their neighborhoods. You gotta beat a whole lot of people to get attention.”

Two decades ago, though, as Williams sat on his bed and thumbed through Slam magazine, he was just hoping to escape “clown basketball”. After less-than-optimal high school and college careers — he didn’t get much shine at the former, arriving at Rice High School in the Bronx around the same time as a kid from the Dominican Republic who’d soon grace the cover of Sports Illustrated, and he says his coach at Alabama State “didn’t help him” following graduation — Williams earned a try-out with the New York Nationals, which was then on tour with the Harlem Globetrotters. It was a paid gig, but Williams says the $500 a week was “bullshit”, not enough to salve the indignity of losing game after game. “We were like the Washington Generals,” Williams says. “I told myself that I’d never do that shit again.  But that’s where I had to start. There are plenty of A-listers in Hollywood who started out wearing the chicken suit.”

Around that time, Williams read an article in SLAM that detailed the burgeoning popularity of streetball. Players that Williams recognized from watching games at NYC’s Rucker Park were featured as the next wave of basketball celebrities, and Williams, frustrated with the daily ignominious grind as a National, hatched a plan to use the playground as a “trampoline to showcase [his] talent.” “Every time I got on the court,” he says, “I took it personal.”

He’d go to playgrounds across NYC — Rucker, West 4th Street, Dyckman, and Orchard Beach (among others) — and guard the best player on the opposing team each game. “Pick him up full court and turn him three times before he could get the ball across halfcourt,” he explains. Then, on offense, “if he didn’t have to guard me, I’d pick-and-roll and force the switch.” And if that player rotated to help defend Williams? “I’d bust his ass.”

“I’d go to their parks and win in their neighborhoods. You gotta beat a whole lot of people to get attention.”

“Corey is the type of player who starts off aggressive and quiet, but once you get him going, he won’t back down,” says Larry ‘Bone Collector’ Williams (no relation), who began playing with (and against) Williams in the early 2000s. And even though Williams found professional opportunities to hone his skills in the Dominican Republic and Brazil, he’d always return to streetball, a game that is less And1 and more Unsigned Hype for hoops, a proving ground for overlooked talent.

“There is a difference between real basketball and this And1 bullshit, and that’s the point we’re going to get out. You can’t play real f***ing basketball and come out here,” he said in the mid-2000s, a point he reiterated to me a decade later. “Even though I had to use the streetball platform to push my brand, I’ve also had to fight the cultural stigma of streetball. Everyone thinks streetball is And1, which is bulls**t basketball.”

Games against NBA luminaries like Metta World Peace certainly helped Williams, who subsequently earned the nickname, ‘Homicide’, solidify his bonfides. He scored 26 points on the then-defensive MVP during a 2004 Rucker game, and the next year, he says he scored 47 points while facing constant double-teams by JR Smith and Dahntay Jones. “If the NBA’s defensive player of the year couldn’t guard me one-on-one, I felt no one could,” he says. Eventually, opposing teams adopted a mantra: Stop Homicide, and we’ll win.

NBA teams eventually noticed — whether it was the countless NY Post sports covers, or whispers of this “throwback” guard who played like “an NBA player from the early 1990s with the no lay-up rule in effect,” though, it’s unclear — and Toronto Raptors assistant Jim Todd showed up one summer afternoon in 2005 to evaluate Williams. “[Metta World Peace] is a big-time defensive player, so that got my attention,” he says, mentioning that he brought along recent NBA first-round pick Charlie Villaneuva to Dyckman Park in NYC’s Inwood neighborhood. When they arrived, Todd says an announcer cried out, “One of the coaches from the Raptors is here with Charlie V!” As for the game, “Corey was fearless — he constantly attacked the basket.”

That showing earned Williams a training camp invite, where the guard was the team’s final cut (losing that roster spot to Lamond Murray). Two years later, Todd was on the Atlanta Hawks’ staff with Mike Woodson and convinced the head coach to invite Williams. Again, he was the final cut. In both Toronto and Atlanta, Todd says, “You’re bringing a guy in to see if he’s the diamond in the rough, and while Corey came in against insurmountable odds, and kept making it, we had too much depth.” (Williams also was invited to training camp with the Denver Nuggets, where he says he was similarly lost the final roster spot, this time to Mike James.)

“Plus, I’m a New Yorker, I talk s**t, and I know how to entertain. I was never a stranger in front of a camera.”

Rather than return to the playground, Williams used the invites to springboard into opportunities running with the Dakota Wizards (of the D League) and then with teams in France and Germany. At the latter stop, he designed a sneaker — the 187s, which is the police code for a homicide — with the streetwear company K1X (“For a player that never made the NBA and get his own signature shoe, that has never happened before,” he says). But it was his next move that solidified his career, playing four seasons with Townsville and Melbourne in the NBL, a span in which he won an MVP award. “I was the face of Australian basketball,” he says.

“Australian sporting fans just love top players and if you perform at a high level and are engaging, whether they are imports or Australian,” says Santamaria. “Corey was an elite player with an engaging personality who always played his best on the road, and could quiet down road crowds.” This undoubtedly helped his transition to his post-playing career, a prospect he began to contemplate in his late 30s after a few years spent playing in the Middle East.

“What we do, we’ve done that all our lives, so whether you saved money or not, the transition is the hardest part,” he says. “Most NBA guys, their body of work is done in America, and they get the opportunity to jump right on air when the game is done. They become analysts of the game.”

“People still respected me in Australia, or they loved to hate me,” he says. “Plus, I’m a New Yorker, I talk s**t, and I know how to entertain. I was never a stranger in front of a camera.”

While playing in a one-on-one tournament, Williams was approached by NBL commissioner Jeremy Loeliger, who was then the league’s CEO (think more of a day-to-day executive than big picture), about potentially commentating. “Corey is a very bubbly personality, and he has strong opinions and is not afraid to express them,” says Loeliger in an email. “We look for a range of people on our commentary team, and [Corey has] played around the world and brings a great wealth of knowledge and experience.”

Loeliger’s gambit could have imploded — “I love to talk,” says Williams, “but some people are intimidated by me because of how I talk or am” — but after he was brought on-board for a three-week trial, he didn’t leave for another four months. According to Shane Heal, another ex-NBL player and commentator, “Corey is unique. His ability to call players and coaches out about performance wasn’t something that all commentators did…but he brings a certain flare about the way he does it.”

He adds, “Corey’s role has been critical to engage fans, and he has an ability to drag opinions from those fans. Sometimes that’s divided but they have an opinion and want to tune in. This is a valuable commodity for the NBL, which had a backward reputation for a long time, but now we have record crowds and the players and sport are starting to grow their visibility and popularity again.”

Or, as Williams says, “The NBL big dogs have made plays happen that no other league has been able to do. The NBA isn’t a one-night stand type of woman — you have to marry her. Can’t buy her drinks. Up and down marry her, because she doesn’t need anybody.”

And even when those opinions reportedly lead to the hiring of a private investigator, Williams’s ability to needle is good for the brand. The theatricality is the point. “Corey brought this angle, that has never existed before in Australia, and he’s effective at striking a good balance,” says Santamaria. As Loeliger notes, “He can polarize opinion but there’s also an element of theatre with Homicide as we’ve seen with his banter with Perth fans.”

Williams is a natural on the mic. He makes exciting television, and that’s exactly the point — for the NBL to make that jump in the sporting ecosphere, it needs Williams. His flair and energy is indispensable to the brand. “We all have a role to play in the scheme of things, and if I state the obvious, there is no conversation, but if I say something with conviction, a viewer might think, “Homicide, he bodied this league, he holds weight, let’s watch this game and see what happens.”

“Tell me a player that has done what I’ve done as an American on foreign soil — I’m waiting to find out.”

Recently, the NBL Overtime crew won a media award as the league’s best online show, and as Williams held the glass hexagonal trophy, his personality as the NBL’s leading braggart seemed subdued: “I don’t want to hog it… [but] I would like to thank everybody that supports us, and listens to us talk trash for 30 minutes.”

“My goal is to make the NBL breakthrough,” he tells me during our final conversation. “I never want to leave a product because it is hot and jump to something else, and I won’t leave here until the NBL has had the success it sought out to have. And once it does, then I can say I was one of the pieces that helped make this product an international entity. For me to do that, it would be an awesome feeling.”