Rudy Gobert is expected to miss four-to-six weeks with a bone bruise in his right knee after Waiters collided with him while diving for the ball. Gobert claims that Waiters did it on purpose, and called it a dirty play. Waiters didn’t like that, and expressed his feelings to Shandel Richardson of the Sun Sentinel:
“I’ve never been a dirty player in my life,” Waiters said. “I went for the ball. Tell him to get out of his feelings and that’s what it is, just like that.”
…
“I didn’t even know that was him,” Waiters said. “I went for the ball, making a basketball play. He [goes] right to social media. I ain’t a social media guy. At the end of the day, that [expletive] don’t matter. Tell him to get out of his feelings. We won, they lost. So what.”
…
“If he thought it was a dirty play, you come to me as a man and you ask me and I’ll tell him the same [expletive] I’m saying now. I saw it on social media, late, after the win. I’m not a dirty player.”
The Heat’s head coach, Erik Spoelstra, told Richardson that he can see how it would look like a dirty play, but that he doesn’t think Waiters was trying to hurt anybody.
Gobert’s frustration is certainly understandable; he’s going to be out for over a month, and that’s a substantial period of time. It sucks. However, there isn’t really concrete evidence to suggest that Waiters was trying to hurt him, and this is a pretty serious accusation.
