Dion Waiters and the Undoing of Reality in the NBA Playoffs

This article is part of VICE Sports' 2016 NBA Playoffs coverage.

As the great philosopher Sam Elliot once said, while in character as an unnamed cowboy, "Sometimes there's a man…well, he's the man for his time and place." The NBA universe coalesced around Oklahoma City Thunder shooting guard Dion Waiters for a brief moment on Monday night in San Antonio. Given the magnitude of the moment—his team up 98-97 in the final seconds of a critical playoff game against a Spurs team that had lost only one game at home all season—Waiters had no business being on the court, let alone at the center of the action.

And yet there he was, tasked with doing the one thing that Dion Waiters does not do, which is pass the ball. The result was pure anarchy:

Waiters held the ball far too long, pushed Manu Ginobili, and then threw the ball high in the air, in the general direction of Kevin Durant. The push-off was clearly an offensive foul; head referee Ken Mauer admitted as much in a postgame interview before offering an excuse for not calling it: "It's a play we've never seen before, ever."

The end of game inbound foul in — NBA Referees (@OfficialNBARefs)May 3, 2016

The no-call didn't necessarily swing the outcome of the game: Durant wound up losing the ball in a scrum and the Spurs had a three-on-one break to score the go-ahead bucket. But then the Spurs, that magnificently fine-tuned machine of a basketball team, blew the possession so badly they could only manage a Patty Mills air ball. Game, Thunder.

Much has been made recently of the 5000-to-1 odds Leicester City overcame to win the Premier League. At least that miracle was governed by basic mathematical law. The ending of Thunder-Spurs undid the very fabric of NBA reality, inverting the entirety of the basketball universe so that Dion Fucking Waiters was at its center. Which is weird, but is exactly what we should expect when Waiters is in the equation.

Nothing Dion Waiters did Monday night was out of the norm for Dion Waiters. His box score is typical Waiters: three points on 1-of-5 shooting, one rebound, zero assists, two turnovers, four personal fouls, minus-13 net rating. He didn't do much other than shoot, but what little he did was usually bad. He played a key role in Oklahoma City's fourth-quarter rally, but in his own peculiar way: one huge made three, and another air-balled attempt that somehow ended up in the hands of teammate Enes Kanter for an easy put-back. The best way to describe his performance is that Waiters kept on flailing his arms, flinging the ball toward the rafters, and hoping for magic. And magic happened, as it does from time to time.

Oklahoma City did plenty right to win this game. Durant had 29 points and Russell Westbrook had 28, regaining their all-world form after a disastrous Game 1. Steven Adams played one of the finest games of his career, scoring 12 points, grabbing 17 rebounds, and playing tremendous defense throughout. It was about as good a game as the Thunder could play, and yet there was Waiters with the ball in his hands on the final possession.

In a way, fate had been building to this moment for four years, ever since Thunder management traded away James Harden. In all that time, they have failed to come up with even a passable replacement at shooting guard, and in their desperation last season they traded for Waiters, a former third overall pick who never started in college and became a legendary YouTube punching bag in part for calling for the ball like a three-year-old who really has to pee. Dude struggled playing alongside LeBron James for a half-season in Cleveland, which is nearly impossible for an NBA-caliber player. He's pretty bad, is what I'm saying.

And yet he may actually have been the Thunder's best option at shooting guard in that pivotal situation. Andre Roberson, the team's starter at the two, is an utterly defense-only player; Oklahoma City's other option at the position, Anthony Morrow, is strictly a shooter. Of the 121 guards who qualified for the assist leaderboard in 2015-16, Waiters finished 90th in assist percentage, which is pretty bad for most guards but still somehow far superior to both Roberson and Morrow, who finished 120th and 121st, respectively. If head coach Billy Donovan was looking for a passer at the two, he was choosing from a list that included arguably the two worst passing guards in the league and Dion Waiters. Yikes.

Could Donovan have instead gone to veterans like Randy Foye (hadn't played all game) or Kyle Singler (hadn't played all game), or perhaps even rookie point guard Cameron Payne? Perhaps. Should he have entrusted a big man like Adams or Serge Ibaka with inbounding the ball? In hindsight, probably. The point is there weren't many great options.

Somehow, it all worked out. Waiters played a fine series in the first round against the overmatched Dallas Mavericks, but he—along with Roberson, Morrow, and pretty much every other Thunder reserve—is the kind of ragged, one-dimensional player the Spurs usually exploit as a matter of course. It didn't happen in the fourth quarter of Game 2, thanks to fairy dust or a rip in the space-time continuum or insufficiently up-to-date refereeing protocols or whatever. We can ask whether the Thunder can pull this off three more times, but the more interesting question is how Dion Waiters pulled this off even once.