September 7, 2024
Gabby Williams settles in as Seattle Storm’s ‘French army knife’
By Bella Munson
Williams is finding her offensive rhythm despite a tough adjustment period
Six games into her 2024 WNBA return, forward Gabby Williams is finding her offensive flow with the Seattle Storm at a vital time in the season. After scoring just three points in each of her first two games and continuing to struggle the next two, Williams has scored in double digits while shooting better than 60% from the floor in each of her last two.
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“I’ve only had two real practices since I’ve been here, so it took me a while to really get my rhythm, but my teammates have been so confident in me. Everyone’s been talking to me, the staff, just like, ‘Be you, be aggressive,’” Williams told reporters on Tuesday after scoring 11 points in a win over the Connecticut Sun. “So I really just tried to kind of be less timid today with the ball. Just really attack.
“And I know when I’m aggressive, that opens up everything else for my teammates and it makes it easier for everyone. So I’m just going to continue to be aggressive like that and just play with a lot of energy and just get us going.”
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Williams sat out most of the 2024 WNBA season but decided to return to Seattle after winning a silver medal with France at the Paris Olympics. After she scored a season-high 17 points and added five assists and four rebounds in a loss to the New York Liberty on Thursday, Storm point guard Skylar Diggins-Smith was full of praise for her new teammate.
“I think this is who Gabby is. This is who she’s been. This is who she will be for us. This is who we need her to be. This what she’s capable of, this level of play,” Diggins-Smith said. “She’s been playing at this level all year and for years, and it’s carrying over now, and that’s exactly what we’ve been missing — her intensity defensively, her attention to detail, her basketball IQ and then her ability to attack. We saw it all today and the last few games, to be honest. She’s a great addition to our team.”
Williams also hit a career milestone in Thursday’s game, surpassing 1,000 points scored in the WNBA.
“It’s always nice to have these kinds of accomplishments, especially in a league — this is the best league in the world — so it’s nice to, I don’t know, have that behind me. Would have been a lot more fun if we would have gotten the win tonight,” Williams said postgame. “But just super happy to be here and have teammates and a staff that has this much confidence in me.”
Storm head coach Noelle Quinn and Williams’ teammates think Williams fits the Storm “like a glove” and are thrilled she is finding a rhythm. Yet it has been a difficult adjustment returning this season.
Williams is familiar with Quinn’s system from playing in Seattle in 2022 and 2023, but two of the team’s top players in Nneka Ogwumike and Diggins-Smith are still getting a handle on that system in their first season in Seattle. The two offseason acquisitions also had no previous experience playing with Williams, unlike returning players Jewell Loyd and Ezi Magbegor.
“They have no reps together, and as good as each of them [is] individually, it’s about trying to find chemistry and comfort and all those things,” Quinn told reporters. “And that doesn’t come overnight. That doesn’t come with a few games. It doesn’t even come with practice. It comes with time.”
There is nothing easy about this process, Quinn said, but there is some comfort in it.
“The comfort is that she’s been in our system before. The comfort is that we know her, she knows us. And the comfort is she’s a very good basketball player,” Quinn said. “Yes, not with a lot of practice time, with not a lot of reps. We’re trying to figure it out in games. And I think that she’s being a pro and she’s staying the course. … So we just have to buckle down and have grace and utilize this time and games to get better.”
Even before Williams found her offensive rhythm, she had still made a massive impact for the Storm by grabbing rebounds, getting steals, dishing out assists and generally causing defensive nightmares for opponents, whether or not it showed up on the stat sheet.
Storm legend Sue Bird, who played her final season in Seattle with Williams in 2022, described the beauty of Williams’ game on her podcast “A Touch More” on Aug. 21.
“She can kind of just do anything you need her to do in whatever moment you’re in,” Bird said. “… Gabby can literally win you a game without scoring a point, without having an assist, without grabbing a rebound.
“Now, is she going to get those, too? Absolutely.”
Williams’ role this season is nearly identical to what it has always been: a utility player who can stifle players defensively.
“[Quinn] just said she’s gonna use me to kind of plug holes that we have — if we need help with the backup point guard one day, if it’s me playing at the three one day. Just like she said, be that kind of Swiss army knife — she’s calling it the ‘French army knife’ now,” Williams told reporters. “She’s like, ‘Just kind of be that adaptable player for us.’ And that’s kind of what I like to do, and that’s what I’ve always done here.”
The backup point guard spot has been a season-long issue for Seattle. But having Williams initiate the offense, particularly when teams are in heavy nail coverage and able to pack the paint, helps get the ball to shooters like Loyd and Diggins-Smith.
Whether she’s scoring or not, Williams is a fan favorite. Just her walking to the bench for the first time in Climate Pledge Arena this season elicited massive applause. Fans love to cheer for Williams’ defense, steals, blocks — all things it might be easy to miss the importance of, but fans still appreciate. The fans are a big reason why Williams decided to return to the Emerald City.
“I really feel comfortable here. I love the fans here, so hearing their reaction, I wasn’t really expecting that, but it really felt good, and it just kind of reassured me that I made the right decision to come back to Seattle,” Williams told The Next after her first two home games.
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Mentoring ‘Baby Gabby’
Though Williams came off the bench in her first game of the season on Aug. 26, she reclaimed her starting role the next game, pushing second-year player Jordan Horston to the bench. Horston could easily have seen this as a negative, but speaking about Williams’ return, a large grin spread across the young guard’s face.
“Last year, coming in and having somebody like Gabby to show me basically the ropes, I think it was very helpful for me,” Horston told The Next ahead of Williams’ debut. “And I even told her, not having her the first half of the season, I felt the difference.”
Horston continued, “She just knows me. So it was great having her and her being in my ear, learning from her, taking tools, taking tips from her. And just having [her] back in our squad I feel like is going to only make us better and make me better. I want to win and I’ll do anything it takes, whether that’s coming off the bench or that’s being [the] seventh, eighth, ninth man.”
Quinn described the way the two players benefit from each other as “iron sharpening iron.”
“The experience that Gabby has is going to continue to help Jordan. Last season, when Gabby came, Jordan immediately saw the level in which she had to get to from a work ethic standpoint,” Quinn told reporters ahead of Thursday’s game. “And when you have players in the locker room to show your younger players how to do it, it makes the journey for that younger player more, I guess, tangible, because they’re able to see how you’re supposed to be every day.”
The two have very similar styles of play, are defensive-minded and always bring a spark.
“I’m Jordan Horston’s No. 1 fan and I see so much potential in her,” Williams said in her introductory press conference on Aug. 23. “And I also see a lot of the same kind of mental blocks that I had. So I try to mentor her so that she can progress a lot faster than I did.”
Related reading: ‘I can, I will’: Inside Jordan Horston’s sophomore season leap
Williams expanded on this after a game on Aug. 30.
“We’re always in each other’s ears during the games because I think we have a lot of similarities in our game. So when we say something to each other, we’re also saying it to ourselves. It kind of helps us get motivated,” Williams said.
So when one of them says something like, “Keep being aggressive,” “Keep attacking,” “Your defense is great” or “Your energy is great,” both benefit from it.
“I try to mentor her because I see, like, Baby Gabby, and I want her to not make the mistakes that Baby Gabby made,” Williams said. “So we have great chemistry. I love playing with her. I love being on the same team with her, and I can’t wait to see what kind of player she becomes. And when she becomes an All-Star, I hope she gives me a shoutout.”
Mentoring Horston is another thing Williams does that doesn’t show up directly on the stat sheet. But it’s yet another way Williams is making a difference for the Storm late in the season.
Written by Bella Munson
Bella has been a contributor for The Next since September 2023 and is the site's Seattle Storm beat reporter. She also writes for The Equalizer while completing her Journalism & Public Interest Communication degree at the University of Washington.
