Heat Suspend Dion Waiters For Having A Tantrum On The Bench During Preseason

As the NBA preseason comes to a close and teams work to finalize what their regular season rosters will look like, it would appear that one player has decided to make their team’s rotation choices a little bit easier: Dion Waiters. The man who’s famous for scoring a game-winning buzzer-beater against the Warriors once in the regular season, and being an unproductive chucker who thinks like Kobe, apparently was being an asswipe on the bench in a recent exhibition game and forced Pat Riley’s hand.

The specifics of the incident in question remain unknown. All that’s known is that Waiters got into it with coach Erik Spoelstra on Friday night’s preseason finale against the Rockets. The assumption seems to be that his issue centers around his playing time; in Friday’s game he played 10 minutes, with nine of his teammates getting more playing time than he did.

While the organization probably thought that this suspension would send some sort of signal that the team was not going to tolerate nonsense or tomfoolery, it seems that the punishment is not having its desired effect. As athletes are wont to do nowadays, Waiters went to Instagram to show he wasn’t happy about the conversation surrounding his name in the comments. When someone said that Waiters is losing minutes to rookie Tyler Herro because the latter player “works hard,” he replied with a simple “lol.” But the more damning comment is one that appears to take shots at his coach: “lol I would win to [sic] if I had Bron & wade plus Bosh.”

Waiters isn’t the only player who’s been on the receiving end of Miami discipline as of late. Forward James Johnson was sent home during camp when the team was disappointed with his conditioning. But Johnson has shown in the past, still with the Heat, that he’s capable of fixing this issue. Waiters, on the other hand, is getting in trouble pretty much for being the arrogant person that he’s always been. If these comments are any indication, he probably doesn’t want to be on the Heat anymore than the Heat wants to fit in a guy who’s missed 126 of a possible 246 games during his three years with the team.