Robert Williams is a key part of the Boston Celtics, a shot-blocker and rebounder in the middle who is having a great NBA Finals just four years after the franchise selected him 27th overall in the 2018 NBA Draft.
But you may be here because you’re wondering why he’s called “Time Lord.” It’s an awesome nickname, but it’s kind of weird, right?
Here’s the thing: The story behind it is kind of hilarious in hindsight.
Back in his rookie year, Williams missed his first conference call with reporters because he overslept and missed a flight to Boston. With fans ripping on Williams, a Celtics die-hard named Ryan Hebert decided to turn Williams into someone who didn’t operate under normal time laws.
From Mass Live back in 2018, Hebert said this:
“So (we) started joking that he wasn’t late, he was operating on a different timeline concurrent to the one we are in, as evidenced by the fact that I knew he was a Celtic two years before he was a Celtic. And we would do it with people taking themselves really seriously and they’d get very mad at us for thinking they were too uptight. So from there he became a T I M E L O R D, like the characters in Doctor Who whose time travel can tie together terrible holes in the plot of a shoddy script.”
Williams has taken it on and owned it. From Sky Sports:
“So when I when I got drafted, I missed a press conference over the phone,” Williams III told Sky Sports. “So I missed the press conference over the phone or whatever. And they start calling me ‘Time Lord’, like being late. But I got on the court playing and it was saying like, ‘Oh, he’s stopping time to go over there and block shots’, so, I can’t hate on that it was decent. I liked it. I’ve been rocking with ‘Time Lord’ ever since.”
Time Lord. pic.twitter.com/m4GmcPQsmw
— playoff paint (@nba_paint) June 9, 2022
There you have it.
