Guard Brandon Williams, seen last season with the Dallas Mavericks, brings the ball downcourt against the Hornets on March 3 in Charlotte, N.C.
Chris Carlson/Associated Press
Long before he was recruited by a Splash Brother, guard Brandon Williams grew up knowing the Splash Zone. It was an amorphous area, back in the day, tied to no particular square inch of hardwood inside Crespi Carmelite High’s gym other than the immediately unlucky radius directly in front of former head coach Russell White.
White was the son of an army man, and coached his batch of gangly 16-year-olds as if they had just enlisted. He stood 6-foot-5. He yelled. Fury brought froth. Froth brought consequences for the targets of his fury.
So 5-foot-7 guard Taj Regans began to call this the Splash Zone.
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“Because,” Regans said, little explanation needed, “it’s flying at your face.”
From that grew a championship foundation at a small all-boys school of less than 500 in Los Angeles’s San Fernando Valley. White would kick basketballs across the court in practice, and once sent one flying past Regans like the chair J.K. Simmons throws past Miles Teller in the 2014 film “Whiplash.” Before practice, White would have his players sit in the locker room and read chapters of “Chop Wood Carry Water,” with Williams and senior De’Anthony Melton and Regans eyeing each other and rolling their eyes.
Dawg, Regans recalled thinking, what are we doing?
It worked. All of it. Crespi won back-to-back CIF state titles in 2015 and 2016, wearing teams down with full-court presses in a talent-rich era of California hoops when viral “Ballislife” flash was cresting. White made men, including future Golden State Warriors teammates Williams and Melton. It worked because White started a triumvirate of quick, talented guards, and he was harder on them than anyone else.
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White ripped them, always, for the same things. For Regans, it was turnovers. For Melton, it was an at times lackadaisical disposition. And for Williams, who has played the same brand of rim-hunting hoops from Crespi now to Golden State, it was shot selection.
“He thinks he can score 100 points on anybody,” said Regans, who remains close with both Williams and Melton.
Brandon Williams and De’Anthony Melton were on the 2014-15 CIF state champion Crespi Carmelite High basketball team; Williams and Melton are in the back.
Courtesy Russell White
In late August, the 26-year-old Williams signed a one-year minimum deal with the Warriors, bringing a kind of break-you-down identity to a system that desperately needs that but has rarely been able to embrace it. Beyond Stephen Curry — who had a call with Williams during free agency — the list of ball-dominant ballhandlers in Golden State in recent years is fraught with divorce: Jordan Poole, Dennis Schröder, Chris Paul, even D’Angelo Russell.
Steve Kerr, although strong-willed, is completely different in personality from Williams’ head coach a decade ago. But White had a culture, and those that didn’t fit knew it. Crespi underwent a “cycle of purges,” as Williams’ former teammate Mitchell Mykhalov put it.
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Williams stuck — and won two titles.
“B-Dub’s coachable,” Melton told the Chronicle on Thursday. “The way you explain stuff to him, I think, it’s important. But I think he’s very coachable.”
Melton would know best, a veteran guard who’s adapted repeatedly in two years with Golden State. And he was frank with Williams while pitching him on the Warriors in free agency, after the guard averaged 13 points per game and 3.9 assists in 22.2 minutes per game in Dallas last season.
“I told him that, honestly — like, ‘We don’t have a player like you,’” Melton said.
“Obviously, it would be great,” Melton continued, a couple of sentences later. “Someone that can push the pace and get up and down, and run with some of these younger dudes, because we’re a little bit older team. So, all that stuff matters. And I think now, he’s definitely in a winner’s mindset, and I think that’s what we need here.”
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There is instant familiarity here, because Williams has already demonstrated it to the Bay Area. Late in a Mavericks win over the Warriors in February 2025, while assuming lanes at the free-throw line, Williams appeared to shrug on an invisible backpack and flex his muscles at Curry (albeit while the Warriors star’s back was turned).
This past Christmas, too, Williams actually outdueled Curry, scoring 26 points in a Dallas loss to Golden State.
Dallas Mavericks guard Brandon Williams is fouled by the Warriors’ Stephen Curry at Chase Center on Christmas. Williams outscored Curry 26-23 in a 126-116 loss.
Thearon W. Henderson/Getty Images
“I think he just loves the game,” Regans said, asked on Williams’ Curry flex. “That’s just a part of his personality. I don’t think it’s any ill intent behind it. He’s just, he’s a competitor, and he believes in his version of winning.
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“And his version of winning is, ‘You can’t guard me.’”
After those back-to-back titles his freshman and sophomore year at Crespi, Williams missed his junior year — and taking Melton’s torch as the guy — because of what’s been widely reported as a congenital knee issue. His senior year became a “mission,” as White told the Chronicle, to prove to anyone with a set of eyes how good he was. Williams landed with Arizona as a five-star prospect, finished as the Wildcats’ second-leading scorer as a freshman in 2018-19, and found himself completely out of college basketball two years later.
The knee issue flared up again. Williams had a second surgery in 2019, then stepped away from Arizona entirely to rehab and train to turn pro. The simple hope at that point, as White recalled, was for Williams to find his way to Europe and make a little cash.
Six years later, after four G League stints and three two-way deals, he’s set for a potentially substantial role as an offensive creator with the Warriors.
“I think every elite athlete has that,” White said, asked on Williams’ career fuel, “but Brandon’s probably got it in spades, after what he’s been through.”
In simple terms, the Warriors desperately need someone who can get a bucket on the perimeter when Curry’s off the floor. Jimmy Butler was far and away Golden State’s most frequent option in isolation last season — comprising nearly a fifth of his touches, according to NBA Advanced Stats — and will miss much of the season with a torn ACL. Williams, meanwhile, generated 1.07 points per possession on isolations last year in Dallas, which would have ranked third for Golden State behind Curry and Kristaps Porzingis.
Regans, a fellow Southern California native, first watched Williams play as a tweenager against future NBA top-three pick Marvin Bagley III in AAU ball. The bag, Regans said, was the same as it is now: slashing downhill, acrobatic around the rim, euro-stepping in the lane. White’s high school offense used to employ a variety of sets, until Williams arrived, and Crespi turned to simply running either he or Melton off screens for your-turn, my-turn hoops.
The Warriors need that. They will also require Williams to do much more, because players in Kerr’s system rarely find success if they can’t play without the ball in their hands. Williams has already gone through several defensive evolutions, from a coach-influenced emphasis to generate more deflections last year in Dallas to White’s own emphasis back in high school.
Williams, Melton recalled, couldn’t stay on the floor in fourth quarters his freshman year, despite the title run. He simply wasn’t a good enough defender. Pride took hold his sophomore year, as Crespi jumped up three divisions of competition, and Williams began closing games.
“He’s willing to change whatever it is to — especially, over here, win,” Melton said. “Put him in a winning situation, something I’ve seen for two years, and he’s willing to do it.”
Mavericks guard Brandon Williams covers his former high school teammate De’Anthony Melton of the Warriors in Dallas on Jan. 22.
Tony Gutierrez/Associated Press
Melton has played for five head coaches in the NBA, and seen every kind of coaching personality, and still chuckles when he thinks of White.
“I just seen a decent amount of motherf—s just kicked out of practice,” Melton recalled, sitting inside Chase Center on Thursday. “Screaming. Raising his voice.”
He scrunched his nose and mimicked White’s voice, with equal parts love and angst. It doesn’t look like you’re playing hard! It doesn’t look like you care! It always rolled off Melton’s back, a 28-year-old veteran with a slow-and-go game who has modernized himself into a steady 3-and-D guard in the NBA.
It didn’t always roll off Williams’ back.
“Brandon would be the guy to get pissed off,” White recalled. “Walk out of the gym, for some reason.”
It stuck, though. White’s former players tell tales of the Splash Zone in reverence, not loathing. He pushed Williams, in particular, to stay in the moment. In Williams’ senior year, he came into one practice red-hot after being snubbed from the McDonald’s All-American Game and White, Regans remembered, implored Williams to focus on winning instead of trying to “annihilate everything in front of him.”
“What I feel Russell did for Brandon — building that trust in, ‘Oh, this guy has my best interest,’” said Regans, who later played for White at California Lutheran. “‘This guy can help, and this game plan is going to help me get to where I need to go.’ Because Brandon is always going to use his rationale, and for high school, he was right. Like, if he didn’t score a whole bunch of points, we weren’t going to be very successful.”
And there will be times, indeed, where Golden State needs Williams to score a bunch of points. They will also require much more, as White once did.
“I think he’s in a perfect situation for everything that he learned in high school to come to fruition, right now,” Regans said.
Williams has spent much of the summer tinkering with his 3-point shot in his old gym at Crespi, as he’s shot just 28% from deep in parts of four NBA seasons. Two weeks ago he was working out with Regans, his old teammate.
He asked Regans to dribble around the floor for 20 seconds, and suddenly whip him the ball for a jumper.
“Because,” Williams explained, as Regans recalled, “I want to be prepared to play with Steph.”