Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Waiters out indefinitely with sprained left ankle
MIAMI — Dion Waiters formally was added to the Miami Heat’s injury report Saturday, with the starting shooting guard sidelined with the sprained left ankle sustained during the first quarter of Friday night’s loss to the visiting Dallas Mavericks.
Coach Erik Spoelstra said before Saturday night’s game against the New Orleans Pelicans at American-Airlines Arena that there is no timetable for a return.
“We’ll evaluate him every day,” Spoelstra said, with the Heat’s next game not until Tuesday against the visiting Orlando Magic. “He had an X-ray [Friday] night. He had an MRI [Saturday] morning. Both were negative.
“It is a sprained ankle. So he’ll have to go through our process of getting it better, getting it healthier, getting it stronger. And then we’ll go from there.”
Spoelstra downplayed the added time off on the schedule possibly allowing Waiters to return for Tuesday’s game.
“I don’t know. We’re not at that point right now,” he said. “It’s swollen. He’s dealing with pain. So we don’t have a timetable right now.
“We’ll just go through the process of trying to get his ankle feeling better and doing the rehab, doing the corrective exercises and then do the next step.”
Waiters missed the final 13 games of last season with sprained left ankle, electing to bypass surgery that could have had him out for the first half of this season. After signing a four-year, $52 million free-agent contract in the offseason, he then reported to training camp speaking of lingering discomfort with the ankle.
Spoelstra downplayed this latest injury as a continuation of the previous issue.
“If you watched the film, he just rolled it,” he said. “It could happen with his right ankle. So it’s not related other than the fact that that ankle has given him some problems over his career, and that’s not unusual.
“When you sprain an ankle, sometimes you tend to do that one repeatedly.”
Waiters has a $1.1 million contract bonus for appearing in at least 70 of the season’s 82 games this season. Saturday is the third game he has missed, after missing two in November for the birth of his daughter.
In addition, Justise Winslow missed his sixth consecutive game with a strained left knee and center Hassan Whiteside missed his 13th consecutive game with a bone bruise on his left knee.
Of Winslow, Spoelstra said, “He’s getting close, but I don’t have a timetable on him, either. He’s doing a little work, pool work and bike work right now. We’ll reevaluate [Sunday] and see if we can start to scale that up.”
Of Whiteside, Spoelstra said, “He’s been working out twice a day. One workout is always a non-impact, full-conditioning workout, either on the bike or in the pool. And then the last few days, handful of days, he’s been doing court work and he’s been making a lot of progress.”
James Johnson back
Forward James Johnson returned Saturday after missing three games with ankle bursitis.
“Doc had some good things to say and it gave me a lot of confidence to go out there and push it,” said Johnson, who first experienced the pain early in last Saturday’s home victory over the Los Angeles Clippers.
He downplayed lingering pain and discomfort without dismissing either.
“Feel it? Yeah. But is it more mental, that’s why I’m feeling it? Maybe,” he said. “But the things I did upstairs, the tests I’ve been doing on it have been feeling fine. So I don’t want good game, bad game, OK game. I don’t want no excuse of what happened.
“I mean if you ask any of the guys that, there’s a lot of lingering discomfort, pain around this team. So it’s take it however your threshold of pain can last.”
The Heat also had point guard Goran Dragic back in their starting lineup, after he missed the previous three games with a sore left elbow.