I like the Dion Waiters pick because he will win 8 NBA Championships with the Cavs

Just kidding. Kind of.

Seriously though, it’s embarrassing how quickly I changed my tune to this pick.

Tony Hawk couldn’t do a 180 this fast. Even if John Kerry got a job at Reef Sandals, he could make fun of me for being a flip-flopper.

When David Stern smugly announced Dion Waiters as the Cavs pick (it’s like he knew there would be boos, and reveled in that fact), I will admit I was pretty furious. And by admit, I mean acknowledge the evidence on twitter (from after MKG got picked second and I sort of saw the writing on the wall) (excuse the language):

Hey, at least I never pretended to be anything but an irrational fan.

But a few highlights, Dwyane Wade comparisons, and stat searches later, I easily began to change my tune. Again, the evidence of this change of heart is well-evidenced via screenshots:

Before I knew it, I was defending the pick to my friends in phone calls and texts conversations as if they were making fun of American soldiers overseas.

A quick re-read of John Hollinger’s 2012 Draft Rater sealed the deal.

To summarize his points on Waiters:

• Waiters scored a 14.12. The highest score among all perimeter players in the draft.
• His Draft Rater is ridiculously predictive of the high scoring perimeter players.
• In the past decade, only 8 perimeter players have scored above a 13… 5 of those 8 have made an All-Star games. Rudy Gay is the 6th guy (surprised he hasn’t made an All-Star game). Kawhi Leonard is the 7th guy (superb rookie campaign). The lone “bust” is Josh Childress, who has oddly spent a majority of his career playing overseas.

Sold.

Then despite his terrible interviewing on ESPN last night, his PR game has improved drastically over the past 24 hours. He provided a ton of great sound bites for the myriad of newspaper articles – exuded tons of confidence and said all of the right things. Today, he tweeted some Cleveland love. Which is always reciprocated in turn:

Welcome to Cleveland, Dion.  Now get to work on making the title of this article not seem comically absurd.