The search for a new Waiters Island
By Grant Hughes
Dion Waiters’ eponymous island isn’t cool anymore.
It’s overcrowded, annoyingly gentrified, already rife with corporate branding and, most importantly, no longer a refuge for hot-take hipsters who either genuinely or ironically (mostly ironically) styled themselves supporters of Waiters’ whole deal.
Waiters Island is super lame now, you guys. It’s soooo 2016.
If you don’t believe me, go check it out yourself. Getting there is still easy; just do something with wild and unfounded overconfidence (may I suggest climbing to a rooftop and proclaiming yourself the block’s swingingest sex machine), click your heels together three times and, zap, you’re there.
Waiters Island is a lot like Oz that way, which is another aspect of its profound uncool-ness. So derivative, right?
This is a lot of preamble for a pretty simple point: We need a new island.
Finding it will require a combination of unsavory skill sets. We’ll have to be part “FIRST!” message board commenter, part insufferable music snob and part speculative real estate baron. We need to channel all these elements to locate the next so-cool-you-probably-haven’t-heard-of-it island. It can’t be widely known yet, it has to be polarizing, and we’re going to need an exit strategy for when it becomes popular. The whole goal here is planting a flag in a place before everyone else and then getting to tell them how wack they are for coming around to it too late. That’s the music snob part, if you’re curious.
Read More: The Cavaliers and Kyle Korver need time
So if Waiters is out, who fits the bill? What NBA player shares his profound self-assuredness, irredeemable bad habits, unintentional comedy chops and, most importantly, a tiny fraction of a chance to enjoy the kind of renaissance Waiters is having right now? Our guy has to be relatively young and possess skills that have shone through just often enough to sustain hope amid the doubt.
Some options:
Mario Hezonja, Orlando Magic
Easy choice here, really. Hezonja might be better known for his cockiness than anything else at this juncture of his career, and he’s got the lottery pedigree, too. That’s a bonus.
Buried on the Magic’s bench and shooting a cool 34.6 percent from the field, Hezonja is kind of perfect because he was supposed to be really good, is actually terrible so far, but still does things like this sometimes:
Waiters’ most appealing characteristic may be the defiant way he’s always acted like a hotshot in the face of mounting evidence to the contrary. Hezonja seems to share that unshakable confidence and flair, which is endearing.
I imagine Hezonja Island is populated with wildly overpriced souvenir huts and three expensive hair salons, but no indoor plumbing. That’s a little thing called a metaphor.
Nick Stauskas, Philadelphia 76ers
The polarizing requirement is tough here, as nobody has anything bad to say about the Sixers anymore. But Stauskas shares a few things in common with Waiters: He’s already been humbled by an early-career trade, has been generally unproductive and has been viewed as something of a joke for reasons beyond his control.
Example 1: Nick rocks
Example 2: Sauce Castillo
Example 3: Snooping photographers
Stauskas, like Waiters, didn’t ask to be drafted too high. But being selected eighth in 2014 helps in the island search because it suggests there’s potential underneath the struggles, and it prices in a tough-to-cleanse scent of disappointment. That helps foster the redemption element required of any Waiters Island replacement.
Stauskas Island is freezing cold and littered with the politest fauna imaginable because it, like Stauskas, is Canadian.
Anthony Bennett, Parts Unknown
Bennett is really just a stand-in for the boldest strategy in our search for the next Waiters Island.
Because if you really want to get ahead of the curve, if you’re consumed by going against the grain to the most severe degree possible, if you want to be the only occupant of your island until a truly implausible population surge, this is the path to take.
Find the guy nobody believes will ever figure it out. Cast your lot with him and know that there’s really no downside for being wrong. You’ll seem charitable if you go to bat for Bennett. And on the infinitesimally small chance he becomes an impact player in the NBA someday, you’ll be viewed as some kind of oracle.
Next: Joel Embiid meets his biggest fan
Bennett Island is actually just that floating heap of plastic bottles in the middle of the Pacific. It’s a real fixer-upper.