“With every team there is a guy they want to kind of place the blame on, and it will be Dion on our team.” – LeBron James

There is something about Dion Waiters that rubs people the wrong way. Perhaps it stems from draft day in 2012, when David Stern stepped to the podium and announced the one name Cavs fans hadn’t heard of. Perhaps it was his alleged feud with Kyrie Irving, a popularity battle he was sure to lose. Perhaps it is his occasionally juvenile brashness, his confidence that can be taken as cocky recklessness. Whatever the reason, Waiters is making James look downright prophetic.

The latest in the saga of “Everyone Hates Waiters” came today, in the form of a scorching hot take from Gawkers’ Tom Scocca, a piece in which he criticizes Waiters for something—though I’m not sure what. Washington Wizards point guard John Wall has been feeling spritely of late, and fresh off his first ever playoff appearance decided to crown he and his running mate Bradley Beal as the best backcourt in the NBA. Waiters didn’t take kindly to that boast, and when alerted to its existence, referred to it as “nonsense.” He would later add, “I think me and (Kyrie Irving) are the best backcourt. That’s all.”

That’s all.



If we want to criticize Waiters and his game, we can. But he is not a metaphor for, as the elderly like to say, “those damn kids.”

Was Waiters’ statement true? No, though neither was Wall’s. Nailing down the fifth seed in an atrocious Eastern Conference and bowing out to a depressed Indiana Pacers team does not place you on the Mount Rushmore of backcourts. But who cares about what Wall said? How dare a guy who may not even start this season on a team that resembles The Avengers respond to such an innocent claim! Nevermind that Wall’s soundbite is draped in arrogance, a direct shot at all the backcourts that comprise the NBA. Waiters’s response is just unacceptable.

In typical Waiters fashion, he pushed things a bit further when he tweeted out a video of his 24-point performance on the road against the Wizards last season, with the accompanying text “Men lie women lie BUCKETS DNT,” which is more hilarious that anything else. But few, Cavs fans included, take Waiters’s personality lightly. No, as Scocca says, it’s the sign of the downfall of our youth, a mediocre basketball player putting his mediocre play out in public.

There are legitimate criticisms of Waiters. He’s inefficient on offense. His shot selection can be, at times, Josh Smith-esque. He pouts, and has struggled to mesh with his All-Star sidekick. Yet we somehow take his fiery personality, his Philadelphia-bred passion for the hardwood as some fault in his mental makeup, when it should be a sign of a young man in his third year trying to find his way on a Cavalier team that has looked like it belongs in the D-League for the past four years.

Maybe there is nothing Waiters can do to stop from morphing into Mario Chalmers 2.0. The first time LeBron yells at him on court, on national TV, the naysayers will pop out of the digital brush they hide in called the Internet. But Dion is as much a key to the Cavaliers as LeBron is, the forgotten man in a starting lineup who will find himself open more times than his mouth. If we want to criticize Waiters and his game, we can. But he is not a metaphor for, as the elderly like to say, “those damn kids.” He is not a terrible person, and he does not walk into the locker room every day and flip Tristan Thompson the bird.

He is simply a kid from Philly who likes to talk about his game, in a league full of the garrulous. Why he’s made out to be a villain has become an inexplicable phenomenon.