Isaiah Rider had been playing well before this week's escapade.

Too bad, too. It used to be a lot more fun watching him wage war against the tyranny of the printed itinerary. Now it just looks like he's out of fresh moves.

As you know, he dropped a few basketball references into a profanity-fest following Atlanta's loss to Indiana on Wednesday, then missed the Hawks' flight to Detroit and skipped Thursday's shoot-around practice at the Palace at Auburn Hills, Mich.

And across the nation ... well, nothing. No outrage. No sputtering. No demands for retribution. Zero.

This is troubling, too, because Rider used to be able to snap the sports world to attention at a moment's notice, either with habitual tardiness or spectacular no-shows. His last really proud moment was blowing off the start of training camp with the Hawks with a series of excuses that not even Mother Teresa would have forgiven.

This one, though, just sort of sits there, dull and lifeless. He got mad after a loss. OK. He missed an airplane. Yeah, sure. And he blew off a shoot-around. And your point is?

Well, the point is, we expect more of Rider than that. He has made his rep as the best player with the worst attendance rate in the NBA, but after awhile, being late just isn't enough. Frankly, if he's going to hold his title as the game's most inscrutable player, he's going to have to break out of his "If I get there, I get there" rut.

At this point, his only recourse is to disappear entirely.

And not just for a day or two. He's done that before, to pretty good notoriety. But the bar has been raised. He's going to have to take an extended powder, with no word to anyone about his whereabouts, for us to notice him now.

In fairness, this really isn't his fault. All the great ones hit a plateau in their careers where they either must expand their game or watch it wither. Michael Jordan did that. So did Wayne Gretzky, and Wilt Chamberlain, and Jack Nicklaus, and dozens of other sensational sporting figures. Even Dennis Rodman has hit the wall in his chosen milieu, whatever that might be.

Broadening one's game is hard to do, though, which is why so few players actually achieve the greatness predicted of them. And in Rider's case, he has chosen the hardest road of all -- having his career defined by when he isn't around.

After all, it's hard to make a difference when you're absent. You cannot impact games, or fans, or lives, when you've been replaced by an empty chair. It is, put bluntly, hard to be the man when the man is somewhere else.

How, for example, is he to be inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Mass., when he's just as likely to be in Baltimore, or Bali, on the day of his induction?

Thus, his hold on the nation is based on his ability to be elsewhere, and being elsewhere for a day here or a weekend there stops amazing people after awhile.

So what's left? Vanishing, like Amelia Earhart or Judge Crater or Jimmy Hoffa or the St. Louis Browns, while not taking it to the extremes those people did.

And in this age of media overload, disappearing is a lot harder than it used to be. There are prying eyes everywhere, and they're all just aching to tell some radio-hat fiend that they just saw Isaiah Rider tending bar in Mauritius, or selling corporate real estate in Newfoundland.

At least in those cases, though, he'd become an exotic figure, a sure Amazon.com pick to click. Just skipping some prep time for a game with the Pistons is so, well, pedestrian in such an artist of absenteeism.

No, the time has come for Isaiah Rider to raise his game, to expand his horizons, to give us reason to care again where he is and why he isn't where he's supposed to be. His latest disappearance is simply beneath him. He can do better, and he has. It is, in short, time for him to step it up, to be the ethereal figure we know he can be, to be the quintessential 21st Century Man Who Wasn't There.

Despite the enormity of the challenge, we like his chances. A lot.

Ray Ratto of the San Francisco Examiner is a regular contributor to ESPN.com.