What Do We Do After The Dion Waiters Renaissance?

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

It happens, undetectable to the naked eye, once in a celestial while—a star consumes itself in a beautiful fiery supernova, somewhere deep in the vast recesses of the NBA universe. So it was with Oklahoma City Thunder guard Dion Waiters in Monday night's Game 7 loss to the Golden State Warriors. That cruel box score of history will record that Waiters scored five points on 2-for-9 shooting and missed all five of his three-point attempts. But we cannot judge this man or this performance by a few numbers on a page. It may be that we cannot really judge him at all. But let's not waste time on that. Let's just catch the last few dying photons of light from this brightest, strangest cosmic event.

Most of today's Thunder takes will pertain to their two superstars, Kevin Durant and Russell Westbrook. This makes sense, but it's boring. In Game 7, KD and Russ did what they always do: Durant hit a bunch of shots (27 points on 10-19 shooting), Westbrook was inefficient with his shot (7-for-21) but handed out 13 assists and grabbed seven rebounds. On a number of occasions, they looked like the best players on Earth; at others, they looked overwhelmed. We've been here before, folks. Let us break free from the familiar, and let us sing a lament to the end of the Waiters spring.

For all its other joys, Game 7 offered something like the Complete Dion Waiters Experience. He mixed in a fair number of reasonable catch-and-shoot corner three attempts with his usual selection of ill-timed step-back jumpers and headlong no-brakes dives to the rim. Waiters also had two assists: one sweet drive-and-dish feed to Enes Kanter for a short jumper and one WTF fast-break shot-put directed at the head of a trailing Russell Westbrook from mere inches away that Russ managed to pull down and convert into an and-1 layup. Waiters also played some exceptional defense when matched up against a wide array of Warrior bigs, a critical component of Billy Donovan's strategy to switch every screen on D.

Oh, and you better believe Waiters took four of those nine shots in crunch time—he had as many field-goal attempts in the fourth quarter as Westbrook. When Andre Roberson passed up a wide-open look toward the end of the shot clock in the dying moments of the game, it was Waiters who took on the responsibility of passing up a catch-and-shoot corner three to take two dribbles inside the arc and brick a fadeaway. It was as Bomani Jones predicted before the game:

lemme tell you who's probably a little *too* not scared of this moment: dion waiters.

— El Flaco (@bomani_jones)May 31, 2016

How fitting that the game should end this way, since the Thunder's magical run really began with Waiters. Oklahoma City came into the postseason in the role of well-qualified speed bump for either the metronomic Spurs or the historically great Warriors, but this first began to reveal itself as false in the moment when Waiters took over the fourth quarter of Game 2 of the Conference Semis. He did it in his own unique way: by hitting a three, air-balling another three that turned into a put-back layup, and committing such a uniquely brazen push-off while inbounding the ball on the final play that NBA referee training will be updated to look for it in the future.

Waiters, impossibly but undeniably, played a key role in knocking off the Spurs, and he continued his fine play through the first four games of the Warriors series. Overall, Waiters averaged 9.5 points on 45.6 percent shooting—that includes a very solid 42.6 percent from three—through the first 15 games of the postseason. But the Thunder played 18 playoff games this year, and Waiters scored only eight points combined over those final three games, all of them Thunder losses. This is not to lay OKC's collapse on Waiters' offense, at all. The Thunder collectively shot 10-for-60 from beyond the arc in Games 6 and 7, and while Waiters' shooting slump came at a bad time, he was hardly the only Oklahoman tossing up bricks. It just goes to show what a fragile thing they had, and how fleeting and doomed the Dion Waiters Renaissance was—a crystal butterfly, shimmering in the morning light, because it had been dipped in gasoline.

Waiters will now become a restricted free agent, and should make for a fascinating case study in an offseason of fascinating case studies. His on-court reputation is fairly reminiscent of J.R. Smith's last season—like Waiters, Smith caught fire during most of his team's playoff run before collapsing utterly over their final few games, and like Waiters, Smith had a reputation as an avant-garde goofball on the court. Smith opted out of his deal, found no suitors, and was forced to limp back to Cleveland on a below-market deal. Waiters has never been nearly as productive as J.R., but he does have youth—he's only 24 years old—and a less troubling off-court rep on his side. He'll also be hitting the market during Crazy Adam Silver's Everything-Must-Go Cap Space Bonanza.

How will general managers around the league view Dion Waiters? Will they look at his tremendous first 15 games of the playoffs or his underwhelming final three…and also at his underwhelming regular season…and maybe also at his underwhelming career? As a fan, I'd be terrified to have Dion Waiters on my team, and I imagine I'm not alone in that. But his giddy wax-winged flight into the sun was fun as hell, and if it gets him a chance to make yet another spectacularly Waiters-esque playoff run, it will have been a glorious success.