I feel like Dion Waiters isn’t going to be remembered when his career is over. All he’s done in his NBA career up to this point is be a volume-scorer on middling playoff teams. At no point has he contributed to a winning team with his play – at best, his indiscriminate shot selection has an overall neutral effect on his team. We’re seeing this again this year on the Heat, where he can put up points, but shoots inefficiently enough and messes ball movement up enough that the Heat are probably wishing they could have upgraded him at the trade deadline.
Simply put, Waiters isn’t the type of player that gets remembered. That’s why he needs to do something outrageously memorable, something that will give him a legacy. Given his basketball skills and situation, a fifty-point game is unlikely, so this memorable thing will have to be something that happens off-court. It should be a positive thing too, so committing crimes or saying criminally dumb stuff to the media out of the question.
I’m thinking he should befriend a little kid with cancer. Not just visit him (or her) in the hospital once, but be friends with him and be the face of his recovery. This sounds cynical, like Waiters is taking advantage of a little kid with a serious illness, but if Waiters has any soul at all inside that chubby body of his, he would get something out of the relationship too. As a side effect, the Miami media would lap it up because that kind of human-interest story will grab the eyeballs of the American public and not let go.
If Waiters executes this plan successfully, he’ll be remembered as “the guy who sacrificed significant time and significant money to support a kid with cancer, resulting in a friendship that transcends differences of age and social class and serving as an inspiration to us all on how to be selfless and compassionate” instead of “the guy who was a cancer to every team he played on by unrepentantly chucking the ball every time it touched his hands.”