The former All-Star reveals how rookie-year snubs and bottled-up anger fueled a long-simmering resentment that eventually fractured his relationship with Utah’s legendary Hall of Fame coach.
The issues that eventually fractured the Deron Williams-Jerry Sloan relationship didn't begin with one infamous halftime argument in February 2011.
According to Williams, some resentment had been sitting there for nearly his entire Utah Jazz career.
Williams revisited his complicated relationship with Sloan during a recent appearance on the Out The Mud podcast, providing additional context to a partnership that produced some of Utah's best post-Stockton-and-Malone basketball before ending rather spectacularly.
And Williams didn't place all of the responsibility on his former coach.
"I didn't know how to deal with emotions growing up," Williams said while discussing their relationship. "I carried a lot of anger with me."
Some of that frustration dated all the way back to his rookie season.
Utah selected Williams No. 3 overall in 2005, but Sloan wasn't interested in immediately handing his highly drafted rookie control of the offense.
Williams started only 47 of his 80 appearances that season.
Then came a decision he still remembers two decades later.
With fellow guards Keith McLeod and Milt Palacio injured, Williams believed he was finally in line to start at point guard.
Sloan instead turned to fellow rookie Andre Owens.
"He started him before he started me," Williams recalled. "I didn't say nothing, but it just made me kind of shut down."
Williams eventually realized something had to change.
Around the All-Star break, he decided to stop worrying about whether Sloan played him at point guard, shooting guard or anywhere else.
He was just going to play hard.
Williams believes Sloan noticed the shift. He eventually became a starter and entered his second season ready to make the jump that transformed him into one of the NBA's best young point guards.
"I think my confidence started growing," Williams said. "He trusted me. I trusted him."
But the earlier resentment never completely disappeared.
Williams acknowledged that he and Sloan didn't always get along, particularly as Utah's roster changed entering their final season together. Carlos Boozer left, Al Jefferson arrived and Williams was frustrated by the earlier trade of teammate Ronnie Brewer.
Their differences eventually became impossible to ignore.
Sloan resigned in February 2011 after more than 22 seasons as Utah's head coach. Williams has long pushed back against the idea that he forced the Hall of Famer into retirement, and his latest comments don't amount to an admission of anything close to that.
They do provide a better explanation for how their relationship reached that point.
Williams and Sloan were two highly competitive personalities who eventually accomplished quite a bit together.
But according to Williams, the friction between them wasn't created overnight.
Some of it followed him almost all the way from his rookie season to the end.
