UNC Basketball: Jawad Williams joins Sacramento Kings staff

After a long playing career that spanned across the globe, 2005 North Carolina Tar Heels national champion Jawad Williams got into the coaching and development side of things after retiring in 2022. Now, he’s set to take a big step in that journey.

On Tuesday, it was announced that Williams has been hired as a player development coach by the Sacramento Kings of the NBA.

The Kings are a team that appears on the rise after breaking a 17-year long playoff drought this past season. There they fell to the reigning champion Golden State Warriors in a hard-fought, seven-game series. He will join another Tar Heel there as Harrison Barnes recently reupped with Sacramento and signed a three-year, $45 million contract extension after helping the Kings return to the postseason.

Williams spent last season as a coach for Nagasaki Velca in Japan, where he had spent the last couple years of his playing career. After his UNC career ended in 2005, Williams also played in Spain, Israel, France, Turkey, Puerto Rico, Greece, Italy, and briefly in the NBA with the Cleveland Cavaliers.

At UNC, Williams was part of the 2005 national championship team, and started every game in the 2004-05 season. He finished as the team’s third-leading scorer that year, putting up 13.1 points per game. For his career, he averaged 12.7 points, 4.0 rebounds, and 1.4 assists per game. He also started in an impressive 105 games over the course of his four-year career in Chapel Hill.

Best of luck to Jawad as he begins his NBA coaching journey!