When the reigning NBA champion Oklahoma City Thunder begin their title defense on Tuesday, tipping off the 2025-26 NBA season against old pal Kevin Durant and the Houston Rockets, they’ll do so without one of their most important players. Forward Jalen Williams will miss Tuesday’s opening tilt as he continues to recover from offseason surgery on his right wrist, according to the NBA’s official injury report.
When Williams, 24, went under the knife to repair a torn scapholunate ligament in his right wrist on July 1, the Thunder said he’d be re-evaluated in 12 weeks. Now, nearly four months later, the team still “has not publicly discussed specifics regarding Williams’ timetable,” but does not expect him to “miss an extended stretch,” according to ESPN’s Tim MacMahon.
Advertisement
Thunder head coach Mark Daigneault has said that Williams is “progressing” and “right on schedule,” according to MacMahon. It remains unclear, though, when Williams — second on Oklahoma City in scoring and assists last season, behind league MVP Shai Gilgeous-Alexander — will take the court for a Thunder team that enters the 2025-26 campaign heavily favored to repeat as NBA champions.
Williams suffered the injury during Oklahoma City’s April 9, 2025, victory over the Phoenix Suns in the final week of the regular season. As he detailed in a post-surgery video on his YouTube channel, Williams — who says he’d already been dealing with a wrist sprain for the majority of the season — was jockeying for position on a jump ball with Suns star Devin Booker when things went south.
“I remember pulling my hand out the mix, bro, and I kind of heard almost, like, a paper-ripping noise — or, like, air, like a switch,” Williams said. “And I’m, like, looking around a little bit, and then my hand is just on fire. The whole top of my wrist is on fire.”
Advertisement
He finished that game with 33 points, 7 rebounds, 5 assists, 3 steals and 2 turnovers in 36 minutes — a do-it-all performance emblematic of the all-around impact he had throughout a campaign that earned him the first All-Star, All-NBA and All-Defensive honors of his young career.
At times during postseason practice sessions and shootarounds, Williams could be seen wearing a brace and therapeutic tape on that ailing right wrist, which was so stiff that he’d later describe it as “like if you put Laffy Taffy in the freezer, and then tried to bend it.” He said in his YouTube video that he received lidocaine injections before every Thunder playoff game, sometimes as late as 10 minutes before tipoff to try to ensure its pain-relieving, numbing effects lasted through the fourth quarter.
“I got 28 or 29 shots in my hand throughout the playoffs,” Williams said. “And I was just like, ‘That can’t be for nothing.’ We have to win.”
Advertisement
It wasn’t. Williams didn’t miss any time, and while his production at times waned — he shot under 40% from the field in nine of Oklahoma City’s 23 playoff games, as he struggled through being unable to follow through on his jumper — he continued to shoulder a significant two-way burden for Daigneault’s squad without complaint.
“The part that I’m most impressed with is in our modern era, when someone has a poor performance, or they’re not playing to their capability in a game and there’s a lot of attention on it, you often see a little birdie make sure that everybody knows that the player is not 100%,” Thunder vice president of basketball operations Sam Presti said during his post-Finals press conference. “Never happened with this guy. Not one time. He powered through. He showed incredible mental endurance and security in himself.”
Despite suffering the injury just before the start of the postseason, Williams shined throughout Oklahoma City’s playoff run, averaging 21.4 points, 5.5 rebounds, 4.8 assists and 1.4 steals in 34.6 minutes per game as the Thunder won the Western Conference crown and outlasted the Indiana Pacers in seven hard-fought games in the 2025 NBA Finals. The highlight of Williams’ Finals run came during Game 5, with the series tied at 2-2, when he turned in the game of his life, scoring 40 points on 14-for-25 shooting with 6 rebounds, 4 assists, 1 steal and just 1 turnover in 35 minutes to propel Oklahoma City to a 3-2 lead.
Advertisement
Williams, who signed a five-year maximum-salaried contract extension with the Thunder that could pay him as much as $287 million through 2031, spent much of the summer working on his left hand, and reportedly only resumed shooting with his dominant right hand earlier this month. When that hand will be ready for NBA action remains unclear; it will be ready, though, to receive some jewelry on Tuesday night.
“We’ll get back after it next season,” Williams said in his July 8 video. “But I’ll be able to put a ring on my cast hand.”