They Really Put J.R. Smith and Dion Waiters In The Same Trade
Along with several other players, all of whom are justifiably overshadowed
January 5, 2015
Oklahoma City Thunder receive: Dion Waiters (from CLE)
Cleveland Cavaliers receive: Iman Shumpert, J.R. Smith (from NYK); 2016 1st-round pick (#26, subsequently traded) (from OKC)
New York Knicks receive: Lance Thomas (from OKC), Lou Amundson, Alex Kirk, 2019 2nd-round pick (from CLE)
Can we circle back to this one? It’s the first post of the new year and this is the best NBA move we have until the Trade Deadline on February 19. It’s quite possibly the most fun NBA move we’ll ever be able to discuss; one of these guys got suspended for throwing soup at his coach and there won’t even be space to mention it. It feels like a bad idea to lead off with firecrackers knowing that I have absolutely no follow-up. We’re going to close this post with discussion of this trade and let the others serve as opening acts.
January 7, 2015
Philadelphia 76ers receive: Jared Cunningham, Cenk Aykol, cash
Los Angeles Clippers receive: Sergei Lishouk
That’s more like it.
We’ve written about two of these players before, neither of which were actually “players.” Theoretical Cenk Aykol was traded at the 2014 deadline, a time so early in the history of Trades Ten Years Later that there’s no audio and four paragraphs worth of Cenk Aykol discussion. Theoretical Sergei Lishouk was traded in July, a time so recent in the history of Trades Ten Years Later that the audio runs 45 minutes and there are eleven different trades discussed.
As a refresher, these guys were drafted in 2004 and 2005 (don’t remember which is which, doesn’t matter) and getting towards the end of their lengthy European careers. Once upon a time, they were 2nd-round picks with slight but real chances of turning into valuable players. Now they were certifiably not coming to the NBA and their only go-forward contribution to the league would be as a bauble to be passed around from team to team. The elimination of that upside made it easy to rationalize trading them as an entirely genericized basketball player concept.
The most common reason a theoretical player gets traded is to dump salary. That’s also essentially the only reason we’ve seen the Philadelphia 76ers acquire a basketball player. It’s just a little tragic in this case that the salary-dumped player was Jared Cunningham. The NBA.com article summarizing the trade notes that Cunningham’s $915,243 salary was the lowest for any Clipper, making this the saddest possible salary dump that these circumstances could offer. Cunningham was drafted 24th overall in 2012, traded after his first season, and then waived during his second season. He signed with the Clippers in the summer before his third NBA season and they were already his fourth team. So far in the 2014-15 season, he had played 89 minutes of basketball, none of which had been in a truly competitive context since November.
Jared Cunningham was immediately waived and would not play any more NBA minutes that season. He had his longest run of action the next season with the championship-bound Cleveland Cavaliers (more on them later), but was traded away and waived again at the trade deadline. He’s signed a couple more contracts with NBA teams, none of which resulted in gametime, and played a key role for Vojvodina Novi Sad in a 80-74 loss in the ABA League 2 playoffs on May 16. The plot gets harder to follow from there, but Cunningham seemingly joined Astros de Jalisco in the Mexican LNBP for the stretch run of their season. The team account celebrated his primeros puntos on October 4 and he played in the remaining five regular season games after that, but wasn’t involved with the playoffs. I assume he wasn’t eligible but am not going to look into this one further.
The top Reddit comment reacting to this trade declared “Those aren’t real people,” nailing the requisite analysis.
Cleveland Cavaliers receive: Timofey Mozgov, 2015 2nd-round pick (#53, Sir’Dominic Pointer selected)
Denver Nuggets receive: 2016 1st-round pick Cleveland got from OKC in the trade we skipped over (#26, subsequently traded again, Furkan Korkmaz eventually selected), 2017 1st-round pick (#20, subsequently traded, Harry Giles selected)
Substantially more legitimate trade!
After being abandoned by LeBron James in 2010 and lurching to the gutter of the Eastern Conference, the Cleveland Cavaliers had brought their King back home in the summer of 2014. James paired with recent first-overall pick Kyrie Irving and Cleveland’s other recent first overall picks were traded to bring in Kevin Love as the third banana. After a 33-49 finish in the 2013-14 season, bringing in the best player in the world and another proven All-Star reignited the team’s performance and was leading to stronger results in the 2014-15 season.
That’s technically true, but incredibly misleading in relation to expectations. Cleveland got off to a slow start, going 5-7 through their first 12 games. They entered the new year on a three-game skid that dropped their record to 18-14. This would comfortably put Cleveland in the playoffs thanks to a horrific Eastern Conference where only six teams had winning records, but a #5 seed was substantially lower than reasonably-set expectations. Even worse, they suffered a cataclysmic loss when recently-extended starting center Anderson Varejao tore his Achilles in December. The Cavaliers would spend January making a flurry of trades to bolster their roster, echoing behavior that we’ll see repeated over the Second LeBron James Era in Cleveland.
Timofey Mozgov wasn’t the first target (we’re skipping over the first targets until the end of this post), but he was certainly the largest. The 7’1” Mozgov was born in Leningrad and was five years old when the city changed its name back to St. Petersburg, though he probably was not yet 7’1” when either of these events occurred. Mozgov spent six seasons playing professionally in Russia before signing a three-year contract with the Knicks in the summer of 2010 that brought him stateside. This was long enough ago in the history of the Internet for bloggers to have basically no information on a foreign player, but early reports from the few people who had watched recent BC Khimki basketball games AND spoke English made claims like “Mozgov can play[,] guys” and “I implore to you that Mozgov is an NBA player.”
He was an NBA player in New York for precisely 458 minutes. In February, Mozgov was one of the 18 players caught in the crossfire of the legendary Carmelo Anthony trade and sent to Denver. It took time for Mozgov to earn playing time in the new organization, with his transition disrupted by a return to Khimki during the 2011 NBA lockout. His role didn’t expand much over the next couple of seasons, but he still signed a multi-year contract extension with the Nuggets in the summer of 2013. Maybe making a financial commitment helped build Denver’s trust in Mozgov, or maybe he just got better in his age-27 season. Either way, Mozgov took a leap in the 2013-14 season, playing in all 82 games for the Nuggets and playing more minutes than he had in his entire NBA career to that point. He set new career highs in basically every statistic, with the highlight coming in an absurd 29-rebound performance against Golden State that set a high mark for the entire league that year. Unfortunately for Mozgov, the 29 rebounds were somewhat overshadowed in popular memory by the 93 points that the broadcast mistakenly threw onto this graphic:
The following summer, the Cavaliers traded away the only player in NBA history born in St. Petersburg (post-name change), so the only player in NBA history born in Leningrad was a natural fit. Reports that Mozgov would be targeted by the Cavaliers emerged in August and were quickly dismissed by Nuggets fans. The concerns were two-fold: first, the Nuggets wouldn’t want to give up on a player who was just starting to break through after so much effort had been put into his development. Second, the Cavaliers had just burned all their assets acquiring Kevin Love and didn’t seem like they’d have anything to offer, let alone sufficient cap space to fit Mozgov’s $4.6 million salary.
Five months later, the Cavaliers were acquiring Mozgov in exchange for two first round picks. This asset production was a result of a series of convoluted trades, some of which we’ve discussed and others of which we’ve skipped because they were too individually boring. Observers were enthralled by the rapidity with which Cleveland had flipped its entire supporting cast and were at least excited to watch the fireworks. Denver fans were still disappointed to see Mozgov go, but couldn’t deny that two protected first-round picks was an incredible return from a value perspective. This would also result in more time for the young Jusuf Nurkic, who Denver fans were excited by, and more time for Javale McGee, who Denver fans were decisively less excited about.
Since we’re going to have to circle back to the Cavaliers at the end, we’ll talk about how it went for every other party involved instead. The 2016 1st-round pick was used to select Furkan Korkmaz, which didn’t matter to the Nuggets. They traded the pick away a month later to salary dump McGee. The 2017 1st-round pick was used to select Harry Giles, which didn’t matter to the Nuggets. They traded the pick away at the 2017 trade deadline to salary dump Nurkic.
It’s really only confusing when the two moves are put in immediate contrast. The departure of Mozgov and McGee would clear space for Jusuf Nurkic. He made his first career NBA start the day Mozgov left Denver and started for the rest of the season before undergoing patellar tendon surgery in the offseason. That surgery delayed his start to the 2015-16 season until January, by which time the Nuggets had brought over a 2014 2nd-round pick from Serbia to fill in at center. It turned out that guy would become the best basketball player born in the 1990s, pushing Nurkic out of the starting center spot and necessitating the 2017 trade. Trading Mozgov allowed the Nuggets to trade McGee, which made space for Nurkic, who could then be traded to make space for Jokic. Three MVPs and a championship later, it seems like that worked out nicely.
It worked out nicely for the Cavs too, which we’ll get to later. And it might’ve worked out for Timofey Mozgov most of all. For the second time in the history of Trades Ten Years Later, I am going to quote directly from someone’s Wikipedia page because the writing and sourcing is already as good as it can be:
On 8 July 2016, Mozgov signed a four-year, $64 million contract with the Los Angeles Lakers. The Lakers received “league-wide criticism” for the size of Mozgov’s contract. The contract has been described as “huge,” “dreadful,” and “indefensible.”
That’s a lot of negative adjectives, but those are all intended to apply for the person who has to write the $64 million worth of paychecks. Pretty sweet for the guy who gets to cash them! It probably wasn’t terribly fun in the moment for Mozgov, who was a healthy scratch at the end of the 2016-17 season and traded away that summer, then twice more the next summer. Part of the problem was a knee injury that prevented Mozgov from playing any games after the second year of his contract. His final NBA game was on April 11, 2018, when he played the fewest minutes out of the twenty Nets or Celtics who got into the game. Surprisingly, this is the last NBA game to feature any player born in Russia (or the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, I guess).
We can end this one on a slightly happier note. Mozgov’s knee recovered enough for him to return to play in Russia in 2021. His Instagram bio says “pr / mass media / marketing” and then links to the page for Pro Team Agency, his Russian basketball agency. When you go to the Pro Team Agency site, the home page is a giant close-up of Mozgov doing finger guns with the tagline “BASKETBALL IS OUR PROFESSION!” I cannot figure out whether Mozgov actually works for them or if they’re still just enormously proud of their $64 million client and countryman.
January 9, 2015
Phoenix Suns receive: Brandan Wright
Boston Celtics receive: 2015 1st-round pick (top-12 protected in 2015 and 2016) that ultimately conveyed as a 2016 2nd-round pick (Rade Zagorac) and 2017 2nd-round pick (Semi Ojeleye).
It would’ve been smoother to transition right into our final trade and skip this one entirely. Maybe I should’ve. After all, I didn’t get around to writing about the December 18 trade that sent Rajon Rondo from Boston to Dallas and sent Brandan Wright back to Boston. The Celtics had decided to lean into a rebuild a couple of seasons earlier and were focused on generating as many future assets as they could. They had a 12-22 record on the day this trade was made. Brandan Wright was 27 years old and was well-suited to be a bench player on a playoff team rather than a core piece of a long-term foundation. He had played all eight of the career games he would spend as a Celtic.
The Western Conference was loaded, but the Phoenix Suns were comfortably in the playoff hunt. Their 22-17 record on January 9 was good for the 8th seed by a safe margin, but there was obviously still room for improvement if the team wanted to contend at the highest level. They had received a 2014 1st-round pick from Minnesota in a trade from the summer of 2012 that hadn’t conveyed already because it was top-13 protected and Minnesota picked 13th. It was top-12 protected in each of 2015 and 2016 and would become two second-round picks if it didn’t convey by then. The Wolves were off to a 5-30 start and did not seem anywhere close to emerging from the bottom 12 teams in basketball, so the Suns opted to trade this asset while it could still be called a “first-round pick.”
This all happened quickly, which I suppose is necessarily true when you’re trading a guy whose entire tenure with the team could fit into a typical college winter break. News broke early on the 9th that Celtics GM Danny Ainge had informed Brandan Wright that he was on the trade block. A Suns fan on Reddit registered interest with an “Us please. How much does he make?” A Rockets fan helpfully weighed in “if Celtics can’t get anything else for him, makes sense to trade him for a couple of future 2nd rounders.” As with most trades in professional sports, the respective front offices were just scrolling on Reddit waiting for fans to come up with suitable trade offers, and they submitted this basic framework shortly thereafter. Celtics fans quickly made tribute videos to commemorate the departure of a franchise icon:
This trade was supposed to give Phoenix one of the most fearsome benches in basketball, but things didn’t quite go as expected. After trading away Wright, Boston finished the season on a 28-20 run that earned them a playoff spot at 40-42. After acquiring Wright, Phoenix finished the season on a 17-26 skid that left them out of the playoffs at 39-43. This had much less to do with Wright than it did with another trade the two teams would make in the coming weeks.
The 2016 2nd-round pick was used on a Serbian fellow named Rade Zagorac. He never played a minute of NBA basketball, but seems to have been paid over $2 million by the Memphis Grizzlies. Not bad! The 2017 2nd-round pick was used on a Kansan fellow named Semi Ojeleye. Ojeleye was consistently below-average, but managed to stick around in Boston for all four years of his rookie contract. Good outcome for a second-round pick! After his rookie contract expired, he signed with Milwaukee and got off to an “all-time bad” start to the season that had Bucks fans saying they had “never hated a Buck more than him.” He was traded to the Clippers at the 2022 trade deadline, waived after ten games, and has played in Europe since then.
January 5, 2015
Oklahoma City Thunder receive: Dion Waiters (from CLE)
Cleveland Cavaliers receive: Iman Shumpert, J.R. Smith (from NYK); 2016 1st-round pick (#26, subsequently traded) (from OKC)
New York Knicks receive: Lance Thomas (from OKC), Lou Amundson, Alex Kirk, 2019 2nd-round pick (#33, subsequently traded) (from CLE)
We’re back where we started and the good news about our circuitous route is that we’ve already got a bit of a roadmap for how to discuss this one. We know that Cleveland is looking to dramatically improve their roster and short on assets or cap space that could make that happen. We know that they’re going to get back a first round pick that eventually gets used to draft Furkan Korkmaz and flip it for Timofey Mozgov four days later. It’s mostly a question of filling in how they got there.
There was essentially one member of the Cavaliers that qualified as a viable trade asset and his name was Dion Waiters. Waiters was such a legendary basketball player as a youth in Philadelphia that he received (and accepted) a scholarship offer from Syracuse despite not playing any basketball in his freshman year of high school. Waiters played two seasons at Syracuse and earned Sixth Man of the Year in his sophomore year, then declared for the draft. His selection at #4 overall in the 2012 Draft despite the fact that he spent the prior season coming off the bench behind guys named Scoop Jardine and Brandon Triche raised eyebrows, but highlighted his potential as a dynamic scorer in the NBA.
Waiters proved to be just that, averaging 14.7 and then 15.9 points per game in his first two NBA seasons. In each of these seasons, Waiters was second on the Cavaliers in scoring (and shot attempts) behind Kyrie Irving, the fellow guard selected #1 overall one year before Waiters was taken #4. Irving was a point guard and Waiters was a shooting guard, making them a theoretically complementary backcourt pairing, but the overlap between their skills and ball-dominant playstyles quickly created tension. For Waiters, described as “an interesting package of pure talent and bravado, with the latter bordering on foot-in-mouth disease,” it was frustrating that Irving seemed to be viewed as a potential superstar rather than him. The two did not like each other, with tensions escalating to the point of a reported fistfight during a players-only meeting. It was pretty clear that the pairing was not a good long-term fit, on or off the court.
If anything, I’m giving too much credit to the on-court when discussing Dion Waiters, who embodied the stereotype of a “pure scorer” off-court just as thoroughly. In his Player’s Tribune article published during the 2017 NBA Playoffs titled “The NBA Is Lucky I’m Home Doing Damn Articles,” Waiters reports that his “third or fourth nickname” was “Google Me” and that his first nickname was “Headache.” “Headache” actually came from the South Philadelphia basketball courts, where a 12-year-old Waiters was “this cocky little kid who was always calling for the ball, and always dribbling.” Waiters describes his irrational confidence as the key to his success, and it certainly became the key to his mystique as national attention focused on the 2014-15 Cavaliers. Before the season, he retweeted a link to a video of his own highlights with the added message “Men lie women lie BUCKETS DNT,” leaving it ambiguous whether he noticed that the video’s description read “if you want to understand why Dion Waiters isn’t a good player, this would be a good video to watch.”
Any debate between Irving and Waiters was wholly mooted by the arrival of the organization’s new center of power LeBron James, and Waiters was able to leave a lasting impression on his new quasi-boss by the third preseason game they played together:
In the third game of the regular season, the Cavs lost to Portland by 19 points thanks in part to a second half where “LeBron was so aggravated by both Waiters and Irving’s insistence to dribble around and jack up shots, rather than run the offense,” that he was content to stand in the corner as the offense sputtered. This was Waiters’ third and final start of the season for the Cavaliers. The next game was against the Utah Jazz, and in his first game coming off the bench, Waiters skipped the national anthem and pregame introductions to arrive on the bench just seconds before tip-off. According to Chris Haynes, Waiters was rededicating himself to his Muslim faith, saying “it’s because of my religion, that’s why I stayed in the locker room.” It got a little more confusing when Waiters was present for the anthem for Cleveland’s next game against Denver, and then even more confusing when Waiters went on Twitter and ripped the report as false, even though he was directly quoted by someone who would have no incentive to invent a religious belief on Waiters’ behalf.
That sounds like a guy who a championship-seeking organization should trade for more stable bench options, right?
One of the players the Cavaliers got from the Knicks was Iman Shumpert, the 17th pick in the 2011 Draft. His brief career had already seen an ACL and meniscus tear and a dislocated shoulder that was presently holding him out of action. He was a part-time rapper who was married to Teyana Taylor, the singer who had recently moved from Pharrell’s Star Trak label to Kanye West’s GOOD Music. He had a signature high-top fade until he cut it off.
He was the stable one.
J.R. Smith was basically a fully-grown version of Dion Waiters. Like Waiters, Smith split his freshman year of high school between two schools and didn’t play basketball for either of them. Instead of attending UNC for college, he went straight to the NBA out of high school, as was permissible in 2004. Smith had a strong rookie season followed by a sophomore year where he “fell out of favor with [New Orleans] Hornets coach Byron Scott due to a poor work ethic,” resulting in a trade to Chicago and a subsequent flip to Denver.
Smith quickly became a fan-favorite bench scorer as a Nugget, attempting three-pointers at a rate that was a decade ahead of its time. In the 2007-08 season, Smith attempted 5.3 3-pointers per 100 possessions and was the only NBA player to break 5.0 (in contrast to the 131 who broke that threshold for the 2014-15 season). This occasionally resulted in prodigious scoring performances, but could lead to frustration when paired with Smith’s trademark knuckleheadedness. A particularly salient example came in the 2007 Playoffs, when Smith missed a 26-foot three-pointer with 27 seconds left in Game 4 with his team trailing 93-89 instead of following the playcall that would get the ball to Allen Iverson or Carmelo Anthony. Outraged Nuggets coach George Karl pulled Smith from the game, but subbed him back in to miss another three from 27 feet on Denver’s final possession. After the game, Karl ripped Smith with some of the absolute funniest language I’ve seen from a coach. “I have no idea what planet that came from,” Karl said about the first three-pointer. “And then, of course, the one with eight seconds to go, from 50 feet,” Karl continued, exaggerating the distance by about 85%, “I just love the dignity of the game being insulted right in front of me.” Smith did not play in Game 5 of that series. Tough way to end your first season on a new team!
Despite the frustration, Smith continued playing for Karl in Denver through the 2011 season. During the NBA lockout that summer, Smith signed for the Zhejiang Golden Bulls on a $3 million contract that set a record for the Chinese Basketball Association, after which Smith set another record for “most absurdity on a single contract.” The biggest absurdity was, unlike most players who secured opt-out clauses in any lockout-driven foreign contracts they signed, J.R. Smith was locked in for the entire CBA season, even after the NBA lockout ended. There were numerous altercations between his sister and Chinese fans, like an incident where “Smith’s girlfriend got into a shoving match with Tianjin fans while his sister flipped the crowd the double-bird.” He skipped so many practices and was so frequently insubordinate that he was ultimately fined about $1.06 million of his $3 million salary, but got a measure of revenge when he charged $3,000 worth of room service to his team in a weekend that Adrian Wojnarowski called “[Smith]’s greatest excess of idiocy,” repeatedly ordering food “just to see if they would keep bringing it to the room.” On the court, Smith averaged a CBA-leading 34.4 points per game on 23.2 attempts.
When the CBA season ended in February, Smith signed with the New York Knicks. Less than a month after he rejoined the NBA, the league fined him $25,000 after he went on Twitter and “posted a picture of his girlfriend’s large posterior while making a joke about how it was getting in the way of him watching a basketball game.” Smith re-signed with the Knicks that summer, but his one-year deal on a salary that was less than he got from the Zhejiang Golden Bulls suggested that the NBA was growing weary of his antics. So Smith simply went and had a career-best season, averaging 18 points per game and winning Sixth Man of the Year while becoming a very specific type of icon in New York.
In the summer of 2013, J.R. Smith signed a three-year, $18 million extension with the Knicks, then immediately got suspended for the first five games of that contract after an undisclosed violation of the NBA’s drug policy (almost certainly a third positive test for marijuana). Good start, but pretty conventional misbehavior. It takes a special type to get fined $50,000 by the NBA for untying an opposing player’s shoe mid-game:
Whoops, sorry, that should read “for untying opposing players’ shoes mid-game,” since it happened more than once:
In a twist that there was absolutely no way for anybody to foresee, the Knicks seemed to have misgivings about guaranteeing $18 million to J.R. Smith. Following the shoelace incidents, the team made a shallow attempt to trade Smith and Adrian Wojnarowski brought the hammer down in the article that includes the earlier-quoted “greatest excess of idiocy” phrase, which was actually one of the nicer things Woj said about J.R. Smith in that article. After hitting Smith with insults that include “the clown prince of basketball,” “a fool,” “some kind of stupid,” “unreliable,” having “such an inflated opinion of himself,” and “self-destructive,” Woj somehow escalated things in the final three paragraphs, saying things like “Smith’s always loved to play the part of a tough city kid, but truth be told, he’s a soft, spoiled, suburban jump-shooter.” The piece closes with “the Knicks deserve J.R. Smith, and he’ll belong to them until the bitter end.”
Less than a year later, J.R. Smith was on his way to Cleveland.
I’m definitely short-changing the Knicks in this post. They acquired three players, only one of whom was fictional (Alex Kirk, 14 career NBA minutes). Lou Amundson was a 9-year vet who suddenly set a new career high in minutes after arriving in New York. Lance Thomas stuck on the Knicks roster until the summer of 2019.
I don’t want to talk about them; I want to talk about Dion Waiters and J.R. Smith.
The Cavaliers were playing in Dion Waiters’ hometown of Philadelphia on January 5th. Waiters had secured “too many [tickets] to count” for friends and family and was announced last in the starting lineup to get some cheers from the hometown crowd. But 90 seconds before tip-off, Waiters and his fellow trademates were vacuumed into the locker room as a trade was suddenly barrelling towards imminent completion. Basketball observers piled into Reddit as the news broke of a code-red trade involving two Internet icons, with the 2,287 comments on this thread vastly exceeding any 2014 trade in my memory. The top comment says “this trade shall be dubbed The Great Inefficient Guard Swap of 2015,” but the best one says “if JR Smith is the answer for the Cavs, I worry what the question is.” Amid the hoopla, the suddenly shorthanded Cavaliers allowed the tanking 76ers to score 35 points in the 4th quarter and beat them 95-92, improving their record to 5-28 on the season.
The Cavaliers were 19-16 on the day of the Waiters trade and had fallen to 19-18 by the day of the Mozgov trade, then lost two more to bring the streak to 6 and fall to 19-20 on January 13. By February 5, they were 31-20. Their new starting center was Timofey Mozgov, their new starting shooting guard was J.R. Smith, Iman Shumpert played 24 minutes per game off the bench, and the Cavaliers finally had a winning formula. They went 34-9 over their final 43 games to finish in the Eastern Conference 2nd seed, then cruised through their bracket of the playoffs before succumbing to the ascendant Golden State Warriors in the Finals (after injuries to Irving and Love). But all three trade acquisitions returned to Cleveland for the 2015-16 season and etched their names into Cavaliers history. The 57-25 Cavaliers matched up with the 73-9 Warriors, who had just broken the record for best regular season in basketball history. Despite trailing 3-1 in the Series, the Cavs completed an unprecedented comeback to win the franchise’s first championship. In the afterglow of the celebration, J.R. Smith was so consistently shirtless that the shirt didn’t come back on until President Obama had personally called Cavs coach Tyronn Lue and told him to “tell J.R. to put a shirt on.” “You can’t just be walking around without a shirt for like, a whole week,” President Obama said, “now Shumpert’s taking off his shirt, Kyrie’s taking off his shirt…”
We know that this is where we part ways with Mozgov, who is going to get $64 million from the Lakers. J.R. Smith and Iman Shumpert remain with the Cavaliers for the rest of the Second LeBron James Era. What happened to Dion Waiters? In Oklahoma City, Waiters typically played a bench role behind the defensive specialist shooting guard Andre Roberson, with Oklahoma City content to generate offense through their star players. Waiters played a lot of minutes in Oklahoma City’s epic seven-game Western Conference Finals against Golden State in 2016 (in which the Thunder also blew a 3-1 lead of their own), but wasn’t particularly good in those minutes. In a summer where a lot was going on for Oklahoma City, there didn’t seem to be room for Dion Waiters. Instead, he went to Miami on a league-minimum deal that he initially harbored skepticism about. If we return to the text of “The NBA Is Lucky I’m Home Doing Damn Articles,” we see Waiters describe his initial impression of Miami as “I wasn’t really seeing it at first,” but after getting a sales pitch from the “real O.G.” Pat Riley, Waiters took his advice to “give us a season.”
It didn’t seem to be going well. The Heat lost 11 of their first 16 games with Waiters, and then an ankle injury kept him out for just over a month. He returned in January while the team was in the middle of a 1-10 stretch that brought their record down to 10-31, a calamitous fall for what had become one of the NBA’s glamour franchises.
But finally, at long last, it was Dion Waiters Time.
After a slow first five games where he shot poorly and scored sparingly, Waiters caught fire and took the Heat with him. He roared to the best offensive season of his still-young career and led the Heat to a 31-10 finish that brought their season record to a very disproportionate 41-41, even as he was limited by ankle injuries again at the end of the season. Unfortunately, they were behind the 41-41 Bulls in the tiebreaker for the #8 seed and missed the playoffs. Instead of going on a potential run as a lethal playoff team, Dion Waiters was at home doing damn articles.
Waiters had sufficiently proven himself in Miami for the Heat to extend him on a 4-year, $52 million contract that certified his place as a member of the long-term core. You might think it would be a risk to extend such a contract to such a volatile personality, and you’d eventually be right, but not yet. What you should’ve been concerned about was those ankle injuries that limited his action in 2016-17; a recurrence of the problems resulted in a December 2017 surgery that kept him from playing until January of 2019. During this time, the Heat re-acquired departed franchise legend Dwyane Wade, which anybody rational would recognize relegated Waiters to a diminished shooting guard role. “Anybody rational” does not include Dion Waiters, who was upset about his newly-shrunken playing time. This was probably the beginning of the end of Waiters’ time in Miami, but any doubt about the beginning of the end was eliminated when Waiters missed a November 2019 game against the Lakers because he ate a THC edible on the flight to Los Angeles and then had a panic attack. The Heat suspended him ten games for this incident, then suspended him for six more games in December after he called out sick and then posted photos of himself on a boat on Instagram. This was quite enough of the Dion Waiters experience, and the Heat dumped the remaining portion of his contract at the 2020 trade deadline.
While this was going on, J.R. Smith and Iman Shumpert went back to the 2017 Finals, where they were dispatched by an unfairly loaded Warriors team. Shumpert ended up being traded to Sacramento at the 2018 trade deadline, so he missed out on the fourth straight matchup between the Cavaliers and the Warriors in the NBA Finals. But J.R. Smith was still there and still essential. After being benched by George Karl for boneheadedness in his first ever playoff series, Smith had played more than 3,500 minutes of playoff basketball and proven himself worthy of competing at the highest level. The Cavaliers were careening towards a breakup and took a more wobbly route to the 2018 Finals than had been customary, going to seven games in their first-round matchup with the Pacers and Conference Finals matchup with the Celtics, but the Warriors might’ve looked vulnerable after needing a couple miracles to survive their Conference Finals matchup against Houston. Golden State would be heavy favorites once again, but they had already been taken down by the Cavaliers as heavy favorites once before.
Game 1 of the Finals was electric. There were 17 ties and 15 lead changes as the greatest basketball team ever assembled battled with the greatest basketball player ever, with both operating at the peak of their powers. LeBron played more minutes than anybody and was the leading scorer in all four quarters, with 12 points in the first three and 13 in the fourth to bring him to a crisp 49. With less than a minute left, we were headed for an all-time great finish. LeBron drew a foul while making a go-ahead layup with 50 seconds left, hitting the free throw to go up 104-102, but then Kevin Durant drew a foul and made his two free throws to tie it up. LeBron made another layup to make it 106-104, but then Steph Curry got an and-one of his own and made the free throw to take a 107-106 lead for Golden State. As the seconds ticked down, George Hill cut to the basket and LeBron fired a pass, but Klay Thompson hooked Hill’s arm to commit a costly foul with 4.7 seconds left in the game.
George Hill went to the line to shoot the biggest free throws imaginable, and part of the reason I’ve been including all the scores is to emphasize this game state. Hill NEEDED to make one free throw to tie the game at 107, and he easily drained the first one. Steve Kerr called out to his Warriors players on the court that they needed to call a timeout as soon as they regained possession, regardless of whether Hill made his second free throw to take the lead or missed it to leave the game tied. Those were two of the three possible outcomes – the third possibility was Hill missing it but a Cavalier coming up with the rebound, which would allow them a few seconds to try for a second chance to score the decisive points. The Cavs still had a timeout too, giving them a bit of wiggle room within this third option to either go for a quick score with a running clock or reset from an inbounds play. The game had shrunken so significantly by the time Hill made his first free throw and attempted his second that the world of scenarios could be reduced to three and a half.
At least, it would seem that way. It really would seem that way. Instead, J.R. Smith found a fourth.
Hill’s free throw bounced off the front of the rim, ricocheting high to the left side of the paint where Kevin Durant and J.R. Smith were standing. Smith reached his right arm back like he was robbing a home run, secured the basketball, and started dribbling towards the opposite perimeter to get space. Then he kept going. As the game clock ticked below two seconds, Smith finally looked up to see LeBron furiously waving his arm and pointing towards the basket. There is not a single person on the basketball court who understands what is happening:
Realizing for the first time that his team was not currently winning this game, Smith frantically fired a pass to George Hill at the 3-point line, who desperately tried to get a shot up before the buzzer sounded. He failed, and this game was going to overtime.
That’s not the sort of thing an underdog can come back from. The Cavaliers gave up the first nine points of overtime on their way to a 124-114 loss, the first loss in a four-game sweep. LeBron left the team to join the Lakers that summer, but J.R. Smith stuck around in Cleveland for the next season on a team that claimed they would still compete for the playoffs. For a while, at least – after the Cavaliers lost their first six games, fired their coach, and pivoted towards a rebuild, J.R. Smith vented his frustration to reporters. “I don’t think the goal is to win… I think the goal is to develop and lose to get lottery picks. I think that was always the plan.” Shortly after, Smith and the team agreed that he could leave Cleveland as they tried to work out a trade to send him elsewhere. There was no interest from elsewhere, and the Cavaliers simply waived Smith in the summer of 2019.
Alright, let’s recap and reset with our main characters. J.R. Smith is a free agent who hasn’t played basketball since he bailed on his previous team in November of 2018. Dion Waiters is going to have approximately as many multi-game suspensions as he will games for Miami during the 2019-20 season before he gets salary dumped and subsequently waived at the 2020 trade deadline. What do you think happens next?
If you guessed “clearly these are no longer NBA players,” that’s a good guess and wrong. If you guessed “global pandemic that requires the NBA to finish its season at Disney World,” you’d be most of the way there! If you guessed that this global pandemic would cause BOTH Dion Waiters AND J.R. Smith to team up WITH LeBron James on the Los Angeles Lakers, you nailed it. How do you suppose that went?
OBVIOUSLY THEY WON THE CHAMPIONSHIP!!!!!
If that’s the last act of their NBA careers, it’s hard to ask for a better one. It might not be for Waiters, who was recently attempting to make a comeback. It would sure seem that way for J.R. Smith, who enrolled at North Carolina A&T University in 2021 and started competing for the school’s golf team. Smith won the school’s Academic Athlete of the Year award that year, keeping a 4.0 GPA. He’s now a senior in college and is still on the roster.