Duke's Jason Williams began documenting his college basketball career following a miserable outing in his first game with the Blue Devils as he sulked in a Manhattan hotel room. Fifteen months later, the pages of that minutely detailed diary are dog-eared and tattered.

Fortunately for Williams, his career is in much better shape. The freshman who suffered through such a deflating scattershot performance in a Nov. 11, 1999, overtime loss to Stanford at Madison Square Garden has now matured nicely into the hotshot sophomore point guard for the Blue Devils. He is universally acknowledged as one of the country's most explosive players.

Other than his free-throw shooting, Duke's Jason Williams has improved every facet of his game.(AP)

Unless the left ankle sprain Williams sustained seven minutes into the second half of Duke's blowout victory over ACC archrival North Carolina in the championship game of the conference tournament is worse than originally assessed, the Plainfield, N.J., native could well carry his team to a Final Four berth.

With, of course, some help from his star-studded assemblage of friends.

"We don't want to put the cart before the horse, because there's a long way to go," Williams said. "But I think we're one of the teams capable of doing it. I know we're better now than we were at the beginning of the year. Personally, I know how far I've come in working on the areas of my game that needed improvement. And that's a long way."

Indeed it is.

Just a year after shooting an uneven .419 percent from the floor as a freshman, Williams raised his marksmanship to an admirable .476. His free-throw percentage, which was already an alarmingly low .685 percent, fell to .644 percent, too anemic for a player who has the ball in his hands so much, but that was the lone area of slippage. Through hours of long practice in an offseason spent in part as a member of the under-20 National Team and the U.S. Select Team that practiced against this country's Olympians, he grew into a true offensive force.

Williams, 6-feet-2, averaged 20.8 points in 33 games this season as opposed to the 14.5 as a freshman. He reduced his turnovers, eliminated some of the flashiness from his game ("Hey, I'm not that other Jason Williams," he remarked over the weekend, referring to the Sacramento Kings point guard and Harlem Globetrotters wannabe) and also dramatically improved his overall court vision.

He also became more prudent in his shot selection -- while stretching his range -- and that likely contributed to him reaching double-figure scoring in 29 games. In the three matchups against North Carolina, he averaged 27 points, six assists and 3.7 rebounds, and would have done even more had he not suffered the sprained ankle Sunday afternoon.

Said Williams last Sunday evening, after dispatching the Tar Heels and helping Duke achieve history by becoming the first school to win three consecutive conference tournaments: "I really like the big-time pressure games. Those are the fun games to play. The old saying about, 'If you want to be the best, you have to play the best,' is true. And I want to be the best."

Among his admirers is Phoenix Suns All-Star point guard Jason Kidd, who got to see Williams every day for a week during preparations for the Olympic hoops competition. Kidd suggested that, of all the players on the U.S. Select Team that scrimmaged the NBA stars, Williams was the one who progressed the most over a relatively short period of time.

"He's going to be an excellent player at the next level," Kidd said. "You could just see how much his confidence kept growing."

Hardly the classic point guard, and because he is such a solid shooter and point producer off the dribble, Williams has worked harder at distributing the ball this season. A year ago, he was often his own first option, jacking up jumpers indiscriminately at times, frequently ignoring the fact that, at Duke, everyone is a complementary player, no matter his pedigree.

Williams conceded that, as a freshman, he tried too hard to predetermine the action, deciding too far in advance where his next pass would go rather than simply reacting to the situation. He still makes some hurried and flawed judgments, but they are fewer now, and Williams seems to sense that he has to occasionally let the action come to him rather than dictating every move.

"I think he's on the top of his game now," said Duke star forward Shane Battier. "He's got a lot better sense of what playing the point is all about. He's a tremendous (scoring) threat, but that's not the only part of the game he has to worry about."

But to fully appreciate the heights to which Williams has risen, it is necessary review the lonely hours he spent after his '99 college debut. Starting in front of hundreds of family members and friends who made the short drive into Manhattan, playing in a facility that is still renowned in the East as a roundball shrine, he logged 36 minutes and scored 13 points. Williams also, alas, turned the ball over a half-dozen times and missed 12 of 15 shots.

And thus began the journal, an overwrought Williams sitting at a desk in the hotel room, transferring his self-doubt from cranium to cursive.

It is not, Williams allowed last weekend, an exercise that he undertakes daily. But for a young man who was so confident of himself that he once ignored the good-natured ribbing from his best friends and entered a high school poetry contest, and then captured the city-wide competition, the creativity of the written word is nearly as important as his improvisational athletic skills.

And so the journal bulges at the seams, the cover just a bit weathered, the diary held together by a rubber band around its middle. Pages about turnovers. Pages recalling fundamentally sound play. Pages about relationships with his teammates. Pages that exhort him to push harder, to play much smarter, to run the team as a point guard should. Page after page about hoops and about life, but in the entire journal, only one entry about the NBA.

That one, refreshingly enough, is about how he doesn't feel he is ready yet for the pro game.

At the ACC Tournament in Atlanta, one NBA general manager told SportsLine.com that he felt Williams would be a "dead-lock top 10" choice in the 2001 draft if he opted to forego his final two seasons of college eligibility. "And I'm being conservative," said the general manager. "It's probably more like top five, to tell you the truth."

But the well-spoken Williams gets the point, as much as he plays it.

He selected Duke over Rutgers, which would have been much closer to home, because he wanted to experience college life in full, not just the athletic dimension of it. And he already has publicly announced he will return to the Blue Devils for his junior season and possibly his senior year as well. That lone NBA-related entry in his journal: a note to himself that the person who can best prepare him for life in professional basketball is Duke coach Mike Kryzewski.

The entry is underlined in heavy pencil strokes. Three times. It is the equivalent of bold-face type in Williams' diary and in his mind.

Truth be told, it's tough to argue with his logic that Kryzewski and assistants Johnny Dawkins and Steve Wojciechowski, all three former point guards, represent perfectionist tutors who know the position far better than he does at this point in his development.

But there is another reason Williams wants to retain the status quo for a while longer. At 19, and despite exuding a maturity beyond his years, Williams refers to himself as "still a kid who wants to have some fun, too." He enjoys, he said, sending monthly university invoices home to his parents and isn't ready yet to become master of his own fiscal domain.

At St. Joseph's High School, he was an inveterate risk-taker. He played on the soccer team, went out for the volleyball team on a whim and quickly became, not surprisingly, its star player. And, get this one, he was even captain of the school's chess team.

In fact, perhaps it was the Bobby Fischer wannabe in him that led Williams to Duke in the first place. Or at least his knowledge of kings and pawns.

Contemplating his options during his senior year, with national letter of intent day closing in on him, Williams was still torn between Duke and Rutgers. And then his father said something that not only made the choice an easy one but, more than two years later, remains etched in Williams' mind if not written into his journal.

"He said to me, 'Would you rather be the king of paupers or the king of kings?'" recalled Williams last weekend. "That about said it all. I wanted to be the best of the best, not just another guy who went somewhere and found out the competition wasn't what I thought it would be. This is the place where I can make my mark.

"I grew up not far from New York and the song says that, if you can make it there, you can make it anywhere. That might be true in life, but not necessarily in basketball. This is where I wanted to test myself. This is where I'm going to pass the test."