As the lone inhabitant of Waiters Island, the Miami Heat’s crown prince of irrational confidence only brought one book with him, and fittingly, it was a collection of Kobe Bryant’s greatest proverbs.
Dion Waiters is playing perhaps the best stretch of basketball of his entire career – receiving Eastern Conference Player of the Week honors and hitting game-winning shots in back-to-back games – so it’s hard to begrudge him anything right now.
So when he invoked an old Kobe Bryant aphorism Tuesday without citing his source appropriately, it’s an oversight we’re willing to forgive this time around. Here’s what he told reporters after going ice-cold down the stretch of the Heat’s win against the Nets Monday night.
More Waiters: "I’d rather go 0 for 30 than 0 for 9 because you go 0 for 9 that means you stopped shooting.That means you lost confidence."
— Shandel Richardson (@ShandelRich) January 31, 2017
And here’s the original quote he cribbed from Kobe, with a tip of the hat to SB Nation for unearthing it from Chris Ballard’s 2014 profile of the Mamba for SI.com:
Gotham Chopra, the director of “Kobe Bryant’s Muse”, an upcoming documentary on Bryant, told a story about being with Kobe and watching the Nets and the Heat play. Recounts Chopra, “Deron Williams went like 0-for-9. I was like, ‘Can you believe Deron Williams went 0-9?’ Kobe was like, ‘I would go 0-30 before I would go 0-9. 0-9 means you beat yourself, you psyched yourself out of the game, because Deron Williams can get more shots in the game. The only reason is because you’ve just now lost confidence in yourself.’
Looking back on a lifetime of questionable shot selection, it’s understandable that Waiters would gravitate to such a quote, although it’s maybe overdoing it a little to mimic both Kobe’s shoot-first mentality and his word choice.
