After losing to the Los Angeles Lakers in last week’s In-Season Tournament semi-finals, the New Orleans Pelicans were subject to much scrutiny. Fair enough: the 44-point shellacking was their highest profile opportunity in years, and they fumbled it badly. So, the usual talking points about the team arose, which is mostly to say that a bunch of big-platform pundits who do not watch them—or most teams—had a lot to say about Zion Williamson’s body-mass index.

Williamson is 23 years old, and most 23 year old NBA players are not concerned with gaining weight, unless their issue is that they can’t do it fast enough, no matter how much they lift and how many calories they hoover up. There are countless stories of star players eating fast food through their twenties, and finally hiring a nutrition expert in their thirties and going on a hyper-careful diet to extend their earning potential.

Williamson, unlike the vast majority of his profession, is not like this. It would appear that his metabolism is his enemy, and that his genetic code is trying to expand his body as quickly as possible. Charles Barkley and Shaquille O’Neal, who fought similarly built-in obstacles in their careers (along with with Moses Malone, who Barkley typically cites in discussions about Zion) are right to say pretty much whatever they want about Williamson’s conditioning journey, because they know it. Basically everyone else, who was able to eat the table at that age and burn it off before bedtime, does not know the life of a broad boy in a world of prodigious stick figures.

The NBA media landscape is not a nice place, though, and for its blood-sucking, malice-loving crowd, there is always a shortage of ways to be cruel. So here come the fat jokes, which have already gone on for years. In doing extra research for this story, one of the first things I encountered was a photoshopped image of Zion grinning with unhinged glee as he barrelled into a large stack of donuts. Nevermind the ethical measurement of such expressions: does anyone with an adult cell in their skull actually find this stuff funny? Grade school playgrounds offer infinitely funnier material than the barbs offered by self-appointed critics on YouTube and X (the everything app), who revel in the same mud as daily morning show multi-millionaire sports screamers.

Williamson has been, despite all this sub-literate noise, the best player on a 16-11 team that’s had some of the worst roster health in the sport. The Pelicans have racked up wins against the Timberwolves, Kings, Nuggets, Mavericks, Thunder, and 76ers while no one was watching. If they finally stay healthy enough to reach the postseason as a full armada, New Orleans causes problems without solutions, with Zion at the center of their powers. He is simply too wide to run and jump like he does, and to also have such silky shooting touch. Wrecking ball Zion might send you backwards, but he doesn’t need you all the way through the wall—just far enough away so that his delicate air mail can float into the rim.

Things have not gone according to the grand plan that the league had for Zion when he was drafted out of Duke, and immediately scheduled for an outsize number of national TV games. That big business eye has moved on from him, now focusing on Victor Wembanyama, the new curiosity on a crappy young team—Zion and the Pelicans beat Wemby’s Spurs 146-110 over the weekend, bumping their record down to 4-21. While it’s far from the rookie’s fault that San Antonio isn’t set up for success, I’m sure that he and Zion could have a good long conversation about the massive space between expectations and reality that the international media racket makes players like them live in.

Because he’s missed roughly half of his career from injuries, and because his reputation has been throttled by the inhuman pressures of that broadcast space, hardly anyone seems to realize that there is a highly unique, uniquely potent player still playing in New Orleans, regardless of how he’s made good (or hasn’t) on the visions of glory that he inspired as a historically dominant NCAA player, capable on every play of doing something you’d never seen before. You don’t have to squint too much to see how, through all the deflated hype and underwhelming results, he remains indomitable enough pull his team through the postseason. Maybe this year he’ll get his chance.