Waiters Island may have been totally abandoned this season, with the only remaining inhabitants being Dion Waiters himself, his stash of cheeseburgers, and a few seagulls waiting for Waiters to disappear so they can eat the cheeseburgers, but that doesn’t mean that it can’t make a comeback as the Heat season nears its climax. The Heat are sitting right outside the playoffs as of right now (for future viewers, “right now” means “at this very moment), and remember, if they don’t make it in, that’s a career for Dwyane Wade. Bye bye. You’ll never see him again. Whereas if they make the playoffs, they’ll get four more games out of him and THEN he’ll be gone forever.
Waiters needs to recapture some of the magic he had in previous Heat season. Straight up. Josh Richardson is apparently so injured that he’s not coming back during the regular season, and he’s their “best” scorer. Who else is going to step up? Goran Dragic maybe, but he’s old and hasn’t been looking very feisty despite his good scoring games recently. And we know Wade is done stepping up. He’s thinking about a whole life of no basketball ahead of him, and you can tell that his mind is already on the beach. That means Waiters has to be the guy.
This could go very badly, if he decides to try and put the team on his back for one final playoff push. There’s a very decent chance that he just throws up a bunch of bricks from deep, fails to finish any of his tough layups, and then starts complaining to the refs for the whole game instead of running back on D. But there’s also a chance that he turns back into the microwave we all know he can be and starts getting all swaggy. We will have to wait and see.