Miami Heat: On Dion Waiters & what to make of sudden return of Philly Cheese
The Miami Heat have been plagued all season, but totally ravaged by injury over the past week or so. Dion Waiters has reemerged because of it though.
The Miami Heat are a team that is known for their culture. That goes without saying at this point.
On one side of that equation, you have a team that is always going to put the players that they bring into their system into the best possible situation that they may experience success. Whether that be schematically, situationally, physical conditioning-wise, or simply by instilling or pulling out the right stuff in a guy.
On the other side of that equation, is a tough, no-nonsense, disciplinarian type set of standards, rules, and practices that one must follow to be apart of said team and culture. Dion Waiters knows all too well about the discipline side of things surrounding the culture, he has had to deal with that part several times this season alone. It caused him to be nothing more than a seat filler along the Miami Heat’s bench for the first few months of the season.
With injury hitting this team like a Mack Truck at the moment, Dion was called on last week to give the team some valuable minutes. To our delight, he did just that. In fact, Dion hasn’t been bad at all since garnering some of his minutes back, he has even been pretty good at times.
It is with these thoughts that we would like to say that to those that want to blame Dion for everything, you would be wrong about this one. Dion Waiters was in the Heat brass’s dog house for quite a while and no one exactly knew when he would be liberated, not even him.
He got his shot though and proceeded to come in to make the most of it. Dion Waiters has hit a few clutch shots for the Heat already this season in his short time, although they may have not resulted in wins.
He has shown the ability to do something that not many people on this team can do. While many can do some or a part of what he does, only a handful of others can do everything he can do, which is to be able to create and finish shots at all three levels. He has even shown a willingness to play solid man defense, something that qualifies as a strength on this zone heavy Heat team.
He has also shown a penchant to drop off timely dimes, giving the rock up when it’s best to do so. That brings us to our only complaint so far.
He is so confident in his abilities, that when the situation is 50/50 or close as far as if he should look for a teammate or take things on himself, he always chooses his own abilities. That’s fine, but we just need him to be a little more judicious in those moments. If he could just split those 50/50 moments up between dropping a dime and creating his own shot, Dion could be a top second unit guy based on the way he is playing.
We wanted to give it a few games to get a solid reintroduction to the man known as Philly Cheese, and we have now gotten that. While many want to blame Dion for everything, most of that simply doesn’t apply or just isn’t the case.
Next. Johnson’s journey back to rotation is textbook culture diagram. dark
He has actually played fairly well in his return and just like everyone is so quick to bash him when he makes a mistake, we want to applaud him when he does well. As stated though about balance, a few more assists from the Philly native and slightly fewer my cheese moments on ball, and Dion may turn himself into a decent part of what the Heat are doing. At least for the rest of this year.