Waiters expects he’ll be healthy
Shooting guard decided against surgery on ankle.
BOCA RATON — Dion Waiters could have had surgery on his sprained left ankle last March, but he decided against it. Now we know why.
Waiters said he would have been forced to miss eight to 10 months if he would have opted for surgery on his “badly sprained ankle.” In this scenario of undergoing surgery shortly after sustaining the injury in March, he would have entered free agency this summer as a player who wouldn’t have been ready to play until somewhere between November and January under that timetable.
“I’m not a big fan of surgery, so I try to avoid surgery,” Waiters said this week. “I didn’t want to be out eight to 10 months. I asked for another solution, what’s another way we can go about it? We went that route, just getting it stronger, keep getting treatments every day, all day. That’s all I really do.”
Waiters sprained his ankle March 17 and missed the final 13 games of the season. The Heat struggled without Waiters, going 27-19 with him on the court and just 14-22 with him on the sideline.
This discrepancy is one of the reasons the Heat felt compelled to sign the 25-yearold shooting guard to a fouryear, $52 million contract this summer. But $1.1 million of his salary this season is tied to a bonus that kicks in if he plays in more than 70 of Miami’s 82 games, raising his 2017-18 salary from $11 million to $12.1 million.
Despite the lingering swelling and pain, Waiters has gone through the first days of training camp. All he can do now is go through treatment and hope it continues to improve.
“You’ve got to be smart. I only know how to go one way, though, that’s go hard,” Waiters said of managing his workload in training camp. “You’ve just got to be smart in certain situations, and hopefully it will start feeling better. It’s already feeling better.
“I’ll get four or five treatments every day. Some days, you’re going to feel great, some days it might just be one of them days. You have to push through it and be smart about the whole situation.”
The good news for Waiters and the Heat is that he’s in the best shape of his career, which should help him stay healthy. He reported to camp last season at around 234 pounds, but this year he came in at 219 pounds.
“I feel good. I came back in great shape,” he said. “Last year, my first time I came in out of shape. I’m 219 pounds now. So, my body fat is down. I just feel good overall, man. I cant wait to start.”
Heat continue to limit Dragic: By his own admission, Goran Dragic isn’t one who wants to be on the sideline during practice.
So when coach Erik Spoelstra approached his star point guard and asked how he was feeling, Dragic jumped at the chance to see some action.
“He said, ‘Do you want to go through the whole practice?’” Dragic said.
Limited in camp following a seven-game EuroBasket schedule with his national team, Dragic did not do five-on-five drills Wednesday. Spoelstra joked that he caught Dragic trying to sneak into a scrimmage.
“(Wednesday), he made a go,” Spoelstra said of the reigning EuroBasket MVP. “(Tuesday) was mostly a day off.”