NEW ORLEANS (AP) — Zion Williamson smiled politely, but kept his answer brief when asked how he would summarize his first seven years as an NBA player.
“I'm not where I want to be," Williamson said, nodding in apparent acknowledgement of how little the New Orleans Pelicans have accomplished since drafting the magnetic power forward first overall out of Duke in 2019. "I'm not where I need to be.”
For the eighth time on Monday, the 26-year-old Williamson donned a Pelicans uniform for the franchise's media day. If he's still wearing a jersey when the playoffs start in mid April, it will be a first in his highly lucrative, yet largely unsatisfying NBA career.
His new coach, Jamahl Mosley, will be his fifth.
“It’s not the way I would have wanted it to be, but that’s just part of this business," Williamson said. "All you can do is just adjust with it and hope that things get better.”
Williamson has missed 278 career games — including the entire 2021-22 season — because of a series of injuries and struggles with fitness. But when he has played, he has averaged nearly 24 points, mixing his uncanny ability to finish through contact in the paint with explosive, above-the-rim highlights.
Now Williamson appears committed, perhaps like never before, to do his part to improve the Pelicans' fortunes. He has reported for training camp in “impeccable condition,” according Pelicans basketball operations chief Joe Dumars.
The 6-foot-6 Williamson is listed at 277 pounds, down from 284 — a figure that had appeared on the club's official roster for the previous seven seasons.
“At some point, you just want the player to get it," said Dumars, now entering his second season with New Orleans. "If someone has to call you every morning to drag you out of bed, to get you to work out, you don’t get it yet. But when you’re up and you’re doing it, and you’re the one leading it, then you start looking at that guy and you go, ‘Okay, he’s good.’
“That’s what I saw from him this year,” Dumars continued. “You can’t play 82 games and not be in great shape. And so we talked about him being in impeccable condition and he has done that."
Dumars said he also spoke with Williamson about becoming more of a leader and diversifying his game, namely by becoming a more consistent and willing jump shooter so that he can punish teams who defend him by collapsing into the paint.
Williamson spent the summer “working with different people, looking at the game different ways, just trying to find different ways to get better,” he said. “I’ve improved with mentally trusting myself and trusting my game, just trusting the work I’ve put in to the point to where I’m not second-guessing myself.”
Williamson summarized his new attitude toward shooting jump shots as: “If I miss, I miss. The next shot’s going in.”
Mosley, who coached the Orlando Magic for the previous five seasons, spent much of his first summer with the the Pelicans traveling to meet players at their offseason workouts. Williamson, who makes his home in New Orleans but spent part of his offseason in his native South Carolina, complimented Mosley's approach.
“He checks in a lot," Williamson said. "Since coach got hired, as a unit, we’ve been stronger. ... You can tell it’s not just basketball for him. He cares about the individual."
Mosley, meanwhile, said Williamson has been receptive to exploring ways to improving the Pelicans' fortunes.
“There’s so many other pieces of his game that people don’t recognize," Mosley said, noting Williamson's ability to pass and his potential to shoot from outside the paint.
“The challenge for him that we want to put on his plate is, how do you make your teammates better?” Mosley said. "Can you continue to expand your game more to where it’s not just being predictable to what you’re going to do night in and night out?”
While Williamson, who is under contract through 2027-28, is eligible for an extension this season, he said he and Dumars agree that they need to focus first on turning the Pelicans into winners and that contract talks can wait.
The Pelicans went 26-56 last season — their second straight season with fewer than 27 wins. Beyond adding high-scoring wing Bennedict Mathurin in free agency, Dumars made few offseason moves and brought back virtually the same core players.
But several of those players — namely Herb Jones, Trey Murphy III and Dejounte Murray — labored through injuries last season, and have returned healthy for Tuesday's first practice of training camp.
“I trust in Joe’s vision," Williamson said. “It definitely is good to see a lot of familiar faces back in the locker room. Relationships have grown, bonds have grown and I think it’s for the positive if anything.”
See AP’s full NBA coverage here
New Orleans Pelicans forward Zion Williamson (1) poses for photos during the NBA basketball team's media day, Monday, Sept. 28, 2026, in New Orleans. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)
New Orleans Pelicans center DeAndre Jordan, left, and forward Zion Williamson (1) ham it up while being photographed by NBA photographer Layne Murdoch, Jr., during the NBA basketball team's media day, Monday, Sept. 28, 2026, in New Orleans. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)
New Orleans Pelicans forward Zion Williamson poses for photos during the NBA basketball team's media day, Monday, Sept. 28, 2026, in New Orleans. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Senate passed a sweeping bipartisan bill on Monday that would regulate college sports, an attempt to end “chaos” in an industry that has been upended by skyrocketing athlete payments and near-unrestricted transfers between schools.
The overwhelming 77-22 vote to pass the legislation is the strongest effort yet by Congress to set national regulations governing payments to college athletes for their name, image and likeness and how often they can transfer. It would give the NCAA new authority over those rules and limited antitrust protections to enforce them.
The bill is the product of years of Senate negotiations that intensified after a 2025 lawsuit settlement uprooted the college sports landscape by allowing colleges to pay their players. The legislation, which would still have to pass the House, would codify the settlement into law but also establish new guardrails around the system in an attempt to rein in the runaway costs for colleges.
“It would be nice if college sports could somehow magically fix itself, but this is a matter of law, federal law, and only Congress can fix it,” said Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Ted Cruz, R-Texas, who negotiated the bill with the top Democrat on the panel, Washington Sen. Maria Cantwell.
The bill's backers — more than 70 senators from both parties — say it aims to curtail constant litigation and uncertainty across college sports for athletes, schools and fans. It would also give hundreds of thousands of student athletes new health and labor protections.
But critics say the bill doesn't do enough to protect athletes or curtail the enormous sums of money flowing to coaches, colleges and conferences.
“This is a bill that essentially ensconces a system of exploitation, and it doesn’t fix the broader problems,” said Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy, a Democrat who has worked with labor and civil rights groups to rally opposition to the bill.
The bill’s future is still unclear.
President Donald Trump has repeatedly expressed an interest in the legislation, and the White House formally endorsed the bill last month. But it could face an uphill battle in the House, which failed repeatedly over the last year to get a different version to the floor and is in recess until after the November elections.
Lawmakers will have to start over in the next Congress if the bill doesn't pass both chambers by the end of the year.
College sports have been reeling in the wake of the 2025 court settlement allowing colleges to directly pay players for their name, image and likeness. The fallout has reshaped the industry and led to football roster payrolls that can exceed $40 million.
The bill would codify the court settlement, including a revenue cap that allows schools to share up to $21.5 million in revenue with their players. The legislation would more than double that amount for some schools, allowing up to an additional $27.5 million in payments through a retention fund — a change that helped win the support of the two largest conferences, the Big Ten and Southeastern Conference.
To help schools raise more revenue, the bill would give schools and conferences the option of pooling their TV media rights.
The legislation also aims to stabilize the NCAA transfer portal that has led to players constantly switching teams. It would restrict player transfers to one “free” move over five years without sitting out a year, with some exceptions, and also would restrict players to five years of total eligibility.
The proposed eligibility limit comes amid backlash to schools that have increasingly pushed boundaries, including LSU's now-canceled plans to place players on the roster who had participated in NFL training camps.
“That was probably like a big lamp for some people who saw it and said, ‘Oh my God, this is so out of control,’” Cantwell said in a recent interview with The Associated Press.
The bill also would restrict coaches from leaving their schools during the season, force schools that want to switch conferences to spend three years as an independent and prevent conferences from growing larger than 20 programs — an effort to prevent so-called “superleagues” from taking over sports. A last-minute amendment proposed by Florida Sen. Ashley Moody raised that cap from 19 in the original legislation.
The vote was delayed several hours on Monday as senators negotiated Moody’s amendment and others that were eventually adopted, including provisions to make it easier for athletes to sue over sexual assault and a requirement to disclose foreign financing.
The Senate rejected an amendment by Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., that would have put limits on ticket prices for fans and two by Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., that would have capped coaches’ salaries at $5 million a year and increased compensation for athletes who have catastrophic injuries.
The legislation includes new protections for athletes, including caps on agent fees and guarantees for health insurance and scholarships. It would also require schools to maintain a minimum number of sports and roster spots — an effort to ensure that women's and Olympic sports are not cut in favor of football, basketball and other sports that generate more revenue.
Still, some Democrats say it wouldn't do enough to limit the big money in college sports.
The legislation “places a cap on the students’ cut of the revenues, but there are no caps on coaches’ salaries or on the size of donations to athletic programs,” Murphy said last week.
Groups like the NAACP, Congressional Black Caucus and AFL-CIO have also opposed the bill, in part, because it leaves unresolved whether athletes should be considered employees with the ability to collectively bargain.
All four Black Democrats in the Senate — Booker, Raphael Warnock of Georgia, Lisa Blunt Rochester of Delaware and Angela Alsobrooks of Maryland — have opposed the bill.
Booker, who played football at Stanford in the late 1980s on a scholarship, noted the “outsized role” that Black athletes play in college sports. He said it wasn't until college athletes were able to begin to win cases in court that the power started to shift, “and now the NCAA is coming here to the United States Senate, asking for sweeping powers" to exempt antitrust laws.
“We know who this bill is protecting,” Booker said.
Despite strong bipartisan support in the Senate, the bill faces a murky path in the House.
House lawmakers won't return to Washington until mid-November, after the elections. And it's unclear what will be on Republican leaders' agenda in the chaotic last few weeks of the session.
Pressure from Trump could help push the bill to passage. But some House Republicans have insisted on language explicitly stating that athletes are not employees, which the Senate bill does not have — a key concession to Cantwell to win enough Democratic support.
The U.S. Capitol is seen Friday, Sept. 25, 2026, in Washington. (AP Photo/Mariam Zuhaib)
Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., left, speaks as Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, right, listens during a news conference on Capitol Hill, Monday, Sept. 14, 2026, in Washington. (AP Photo/Mariam Zuhaib)
