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 AmericanAirlines 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."
