Monty Williams was introduced Tuesday as the new coach of the Detroit Pistons. Check out what happened to his wife.
Monty Williams : Wife | Breast cancer | Net worth
Williams was the head coach for the New Orleans Hornets/Pelicans from 2010 until 2015.
He served as an assistant coach with the United States national team under Mike Krzyzewski, and he has worked as a vice president of basketball operations for the San Antonio Spurs.
In May 2019, Williams was hired as the head coach of the Phoenix Suns. In 2021, he led the Suns to their first NBA Finals appearance since 1993.
He was named the NBA Coach of the Year the following year in 2022, when the Suns finished the regular season with a franchise record of 64 wins.
On May 31, 2023, ESPN reported that Williams had agreed in principle to a six-year, $78.5 million coaching contract with the Detroit Pistons, making him the current highest paid coach.
Monty Williams wife
The death of Monty Williams’s first wife has taught the former NBA coach two lessons: the beauty of forgiveness and the need to move on, no matter how painful that might be.
The low point came last March. Or maybe it was April. Monty Williams isn’t sure. Time blurs.
For two weeks Micah and Elijah passed the stomach flu back and forth, as five- and eight-year-olds do. They threw up on the carpet, in the bed, on the bathroom floor. Everywhere but in the toilet and the trash can. Finally one night, well after midnight, they combined for a particularly messy episode.
As his three teenage daughters slept in nearby rooms, Monty—who’d spent a lifetime in basketball, first as a player and then as a coach, most recently as an assistant for the Thunder—stumbled out of bed and herded the boys into the shower, then into clean pajamas and back to sleep. Next he cleaned the rug, scrubbed the tile floor and disinfected the toilet.
He longed to go back to bed but knew Ingrid never would have left the sheets to sit overnight in the laundry room, clumped with all that sickness.
Which meant he couldn’t either. He’d promised the kids nothing in their day-to-day lives would change. If anyone’s life was going to change, he’d said, it would be his.
Breast cancer
Former Phoenix Suns coach Monty Williams told reporters on Tuesday that his wife Lisa was diagnosed with breast cancer during the Suns’ recent playoff run.
“I had a situation personally in my family that needed attention,” Williams said. “My wife found out that she had breast cancer during the playoffs.”
Williams married his current wife Lisa Keeth in 2017, after his first wife Ingrid died in 2016 in a car crash.
Williams is typically a private person and doesn’t share much about his family. He said he talked with his wife Lisa before deciding to make the diagnosis public, saying that he wanted to influence other women to get tested.
“The reason I bring it up is to not talk about my family but to make more of an emphasis that women need early detection testing. We had genetic testing done and then scan after scan after scan and then we found it early. And that might of saved my wife’s life. And it can save others.”
Williams did not go into detail about his wife’s diagnosis but did say she got good news sooner than they expected, and said that helped him decide to take his new coaching job with the Detroit Pistons.
Williams was brought on as coach for the Suns in May 2019 after serving as the head coach for the New Orleans Hornets/Pelicans from 2010 to 2015.
He was dismissed from the team after the Suns were eliminated by Denver in this year’s playoffs. The Detroit Pistons introduced Williams as the team’s new coach Tuesday afternoon.
Monty Williams Net worth
Monty Williams’ salary with the Phoenix Suns was reportedly around $5 million on the current contract. He originally signed a five-year contract with the team worth $25 million and has one more year left on it.
However, the extension Williams signed last season makes the situation more complicated. The former NBA Coach of the Year reportedly agreed to a two or three-year deal worth between $8 to $10 million per year.
Monty Williams’ net worth increased by nearly $8 million thanks to his playing career. His largest contract was worth $1.2 million, and he got it from the Spurs in the 1997-98 season.