Syracuse, N.Y. – Dion Waiters was asked Saturday night why he chose to fly to Syracuse to catch a basketball game in the Carrier Dome.

He smiled.

“I had some free time, so …”

Waiters, a dynamic, confident scorer during his two seasons at Syracuse, is serving a 10-game suspension with the Miami Heat for conduct detrimental to the team. It’s his second suspension of the early NBA season. There was an early-season criticism of team management, then a social-media fueled frenzy that involved a Heat flight, a panic attack and the consuming of a THC-infused edible, according to ESPN.

Waiters did not address the specifics of any of that, but he did talk about why he decided to travel to Syracuse this weekend. He wanted to speak with Jim Boeheim, a man Waiters once credited for helping him grow up by dispensing the kind of tough love he needed. He wanted to feel the embrace of Syracuse fans, who crowded around him to pose for photos. He wanted, simply, to get away, to free himself from the frustration of his situation.

“I just wanted to come up and talk to Coach,” Waiters said. “I know that’s a person who will always be there for me if I ever need anything. It’s a chance for me to come up, be around, talk to the coaches, things like that. And that’s important.”

He entered the Carrier Dome sometime in the first half of SU’s 89-67 win over Seattle and settled at the scorer’s table, close to the Orange bench. Afterward, he visited the Syracuse locker room, spoke with Boeheim about the game and offered his assessments of various SU players.

Waiters plans to stay in Syracuse for a couple days. He’ll work out. He’ll relax. He’ll spend more time with Boeheim to try to sort out “the best possibilities” and the way to “move forward.”

At Syracuse, he played 71 games and did not start any of them. He and Boeheim had plenty of conversations back then, not all of them pleasant. Waiters averaged 12.6 points in 24 minutes his sophomore season (2012), his final year with the Orange before he declared for the NBA Draft and the Cleveland Cavaliers made him the fourth overall pick. But Waiters’ respect for Boeheim grew as he matured. All that advice seemed suddenly salient.

“I’m older. I understand much more what he tried to teach me when I was 18, 19. I probably was a stubborn kid back then and really didn’t understand at that time,” he said. “I’m 27 and life is a lot different. Being here, talking to him, picking his brain. … I’m pretty sure we’ve all been through situations before and Coach, too. Different situations, how he handled it. Just talk to him and try to find solutions.”

His NBA schedule prevents him from making many voyages to Syracuse. He hadn’t been to the Carrier Dome for a game, he estimated, in about four years. And while his decision to return to Syracuse was rooted in those talks with his former coach, Waiters acknowledged the passion of Orange fans who clustered around him was the balm he needed.

Dion Waiters is here. pic.twitter.com/xQOvkUHdAc — Donna Ditota (@DonnaDitota1) November 17, 2019

“It was just to get away, to come around and be around some love,” he said. “One thing about Syracuse, whatever you’re going through, the love is unconditional. Sometimes, it’s tough to get out here with everything we’ve got going in our lives. When you do come back, it’s like you’re still a player. I always enjoy myself coming back. You just feel it. You feel the energy, you feel the love. Sometimes you just need to be around it.”

He described his current mental state as “great.” He has surrounded himself with family, with friends, with his children. Their presence, he said, “keeps me sane” as he figures out how to deal with what awaits him.

“I’m not going to lie to you, I’m in a great place,” he said. “I can only control what I can control at the end of the day, so some things you just can’t allow to take your head the other way, some things happen for a reason. If you stay locked in, if you believe and trust in yourself, trust in the work you put in, you know, it’s a minor setback. It happens. It’s life. You learn from it. The only thing I can do is move forward. Stay focused. Stay even-keeled. Let everything else take care of itself.”

Without mentioning any specifics to his Miami situation, Waiters acknowledged his frustration about the way the early season unfolded. He had lost a starting spot and minutes to rookies Tyler Herro and Kendrick Nunn. The team suspended him for its opener for “conduct detrimental to the team” after he took to social media to criticize the way the Heat used him. He is coming off a serious ankle injury and believes, he said, that he is ready and able to help his team win.

“I’m a competitor. Any time you work hard and you envision something a certain way and it’s not going as you planned and you see it, you know, you go back to the drawing board and you figure it out. That’s what it’s about – figuring it out,” he said. “So continue to work, always stay confident. Just having the right people in your corner make things a lot easier. (It’s) being a competitor and wanting to play and me being healthy. Because you set goals. It’s taking a little longer but I still got those same goals, that same ambition. It’s not the end of my story.”

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