NEW YORK –– There was a time last spring when it seemed like Dion Waiters might be done at Syracuse.
Orange head coach Jim Boeheim all but cut the talented guard loose when he told Jon Rothstein of CBS Sports that Waiters’s status for the upcoming season was “up in the air.”
“Sometimes change is good for everyone,” Boeheim said last April.
Yet here we are seven months later and Waiters is one of the most important players on a Syracuse team that is now 5-0 entering Friday’s Preseason NIT championship game against Stanford at MSG.
Waiters scored nine straight Syracuse points during a critical second-half stretch and finished with 11 points, 4 assists and 3 steals off the bench as the No. 5 Orange downed Virginia Tech, 69-58, in the semifinals.
“The guy’s a beast,” Virginia Tech coach Seth Greenberg said of the 6-foot-4, 215-pound Waiters. “That guy, he just attacks off transition. He attacks off ball screens. He’s shooting the ball now, which makes it that much more difficult to guard.
“I mean, he came off that double-ball screen and just turned the corner and blew it right to the friggin’ rim.”
With Syracuse up 47-42, Waiters scored nine straight points, including a 3-pointer off a pass from Brandon Triche, to push it to 56-45.
Overall, he was involved in 13 of 15 Syracuse points as they stretched it to 62-53, including an assist to C.J. Fair for a layup and a breakway dunk on a pass from Triche.
On a night when senior point guard Scoop Jardine was limited to 2 points, 4 assists and 0 turnovers, Waiters brought huge energy off the bench.
“To me, to have the ability to have a guy like that come off the bench, he can singlehandedly change a game,” Greenberg said. “He’s kind of an ‘Energizer Bunny’ on the offensive side of the floor. And he’s physically strong.”
Greenberg added: “Scoop is a good player. I think this other guy has a chance to be a great player. Scoop is a good player who’s had a great career. This guy’s got a chance to be really special. If he shoots the ball the way he did today, and he’s aggressive coming off screens…I mean, that guy has got a chance to be really special. He’s got kind of an NBA guard’s game.”
Still, Waiters, a Philadelphia native who finished up at Burlington (N.J.) Life Center Academy, said he realized he might have been gone from the basketball team in April because of his fracture with Boeheim over the player’s immaturity.
“I mean, I thought about it,” Waiters said. “But me knowing myself and my family, I just talked to my mom [Monique Brown] and she said, ‘Don’t let ’em win. Don’t give up. And just show them that this is something you do all your life.'”
Boeheim said he and Waiters talked things over on several occasions this summer.
“We’ve talked a few times,” Boeheim said. “I’ve talked, he’s listened.”
Waiters’s response, he said, was to work harder.
“So what I did. I just worked tremendously hard this offseason, man, just to prove everybody wrong,” he said. “I was just in the gym every day, three or four times a day and it’s going to pay off.”
Now, after being nearly excommunicated from the team, it all seems to be paying off.
If Waiters can buy into the role of coming off the bench to support Triche, Jardine and Kris Joseph, there is no telling how far Syracuse can go.
“I just know we got a great group of guards, man, and I don’t want to mess that up,” Waiters said.
“So I’m just going to play my role, do what I gotta do to win a national championship.”
(Photo courtesy Daily News)
