Dion Waiters Has Got This

What is that proverb about finding a true friend while neck-deep in a pile of shit? I might be misremembering it. Anyway, that is where I met Dion Waiters, who is my favorite dickhead.

Waiters is a certain recognizable type of basketball player-and the Cavaliers, after a three-team trade, have effectively swapped him out for a spiritual cousin in J.R. Smith-but there is no one else like him in the league. The game's purebred gunners tend to be loud and joyful; they are the NBA's tropical birds, all livid plumage and contested 25-footers. Waiters takes those shots, over and over again, but this is not him.

Waiters is a brooder who never seems to be enjoying himself, even when he's playing well. Bad performances are the fault of the refs and/or some cosmic Dion-thwarting force he can't quite identify but is definitely annoyed with; good performances are simply another day at the office. (They are not really that, but Dion treats them as such.) He is something like a basketballing Beanie Sigel: skulking along miserably, arrogantly, occasionally shaking loose from his ennui long enough to drop 22 points, then going back to grousing beneath his breath about how much realer he is than everyone else in the game.

What a marvelously depressive figure! He is sweetly delusional, too. Drafted in 2012 by the whimsical and incompetent Chris Grant, Waiters felt put-upon from the start, because of having to learn to play with Kyrie Irving-and not, crucially, the other way around. Throughout his career in Cleveland, Waiters believed he was the real star in the Cavaliers backcourt, that Irving didn't defer to him enough, that he could excel if he were given the sort of creative freedom his teammate was afforded.

It's worth stating again: Dion Waiters played with Kyrie Irving for nearly two-and-a-half years and never once thought himself the inferior talent. Scoldings and benchings didn't shake his faith: Waiters kept attesting to his supremacy (in his own mind), shitting on these haters, popping those step-back 19-footers he likes so much. He balked at a limited, catch-and-shoot role on this season's new and improved(ish) Cavs. He took the floor with LeBron James, Kyrie Irving, and Kevin Love and still wanted to run the offense, not stand at the three-point line. I'm not sure what he thinks he's going to do in Oklahoma City, but I am certain it is baroque and unrealistic and great.

This is the end of Dion and I, in a way. I'll keep half an eye out for him, but I will stop knowing him the way you know players you watch some 60 times a year. He is someone else's problem now, but also, hopefully, someone else's curiosity, a most unusual specimen to armchair analyze and enjoy. When LeBron announced he was returning to Cleveland, I joked to a friend that Dion would be pleased the Cavs were finally bringing in a viable second option that could flank him as he led the team to the first of many championships. A few games into the season, Dion started mimicking LeBron's pre-game stretching routine. It was cute, but it couldn't last.

There's an inspired bit at the beginning of Eduardo Galeano's Soccer in Sun and Shadow where the author laments that the game has grown less free: "The technocracy of professional sport has managed to impose a soccer of lightning speed and brute strength, a soccer that negates joy, kills fantasy, and outlaws daring." This is part of a larger argument the book makes against pragmatism and reason in sports, because pragmatism and reason are enemies of the sublime.

Basketball has, broadly speaking, become a regimented game. It has always been becoming that-it's not like coaches started drawing up plays in 2005-but its regimentation feels more pronounced these days. It is at least more thoroughly parsed than it has ever been. Everywhere, there is SportVU data, statistical analysis, and telestrator breakdowns of how NBA offenses and defenses function. The game is a thrumming engine; it's a cell diagram.

I am like Galeano in this single respect: all of this alienates me. Because I'm an undisciplined consumer of basketball media, I heedlessly chuck this stuff into my brain bouillabaisse, and I don't like the way it makes me think. I sometimes watch games and see two schematics fighting each other, 10 number clusters running up and down the floor.

I try to push these images from my mind. I am not interested in the mechanics of games, or of anything else. Concreteness unnerves me. When I was 14, my dad bought me one of those books full of diagrams that explain how, like, sewer systems and airplanes work. I remember being upset with him.

"Don't you want to figure things out?" he asked.

"Not like this, no," I said.

I did not care about sewer systems. I wanted to read about music and sex.

Dion Waiters is audacious, which is to say he breaks shit, and not in some disrupt-o tech euphemism sense, either. Maybe this is why he means what he means to me. When he touches the ball, there is always the possibility he's going to sunder the machinery of the offense. Fuck pragmatism! is probably not something he shouts as he drives the lane, but it could be. His self-belief is absurd, and it usually doesn't help his team, but it makes me happy. It makes me think about times when I have been very, very wrong about one thing or another, despite being positive I was not; it makes me feel like basketball is fundamentally wild and chaotic and is only ever illusively bound by strategems and math; it makes me go Dion, nooooo!; it makes me nervous, in good ways and bad.

A player that does these things to you is one worth caring about. I'm going to miss him.