Miami Heat Roster, Injury News 2017: Dion Waiters Out Indefinitely With Sprained Left Ankle
Dion Waiters will have to sit out more games this season after he sprained his left ankle in the first quarter of their 113–101 victory over the Dallas Mavericks on Friday.
"We'll evaluate him every day. He had an X-ray [Friday] night. He had an MRI [Saturday] morning. Both were negative," Miami Heat head coach Erik Spoelstra said before their game against the New Orleans Pelicans on Saturday, via the Sun-Sentinel.
"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," he continued.
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Fortunately, Waiters will have plenty of time to rest his ankle because the Heat won't play again until Tuesday when they take on the Orlando Magic. However, Spoelstra doesn't want to get the fans' hopes up and he noted that Waiters is going to be out indefinitely while he recovers.
"It's swollen. He's dealing with pain. So we don't have a timetable right now," Spoelstra stated. "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," he added.
The injury is a cause for concern because Waiters miss a lot of games last season when he sprained the same ankle twice. He even sat out the final 13 games of the 2016–2017 season because of the injury.
Waiters opted not to undergo ankle surgery in the offseason because he didn't want to enter free agency as a player who could potentially miss the first half of the 2017–2018 season.
In 30 games this season, Waiters is averaging 14.3 points, 2.6 rebounds and 3.8 assists per game. He's also shooting 39.8 percent from the field, 30.6 percent from beyond the arc, and 73.9 percent from the free-throw line.
