Dion Waiters suffered a season-ending ankle injury in the 2017-18 campaign, and since then, he has struggled with fitness. At one moment, he was listed at 6-foot-4 and 215 pounds on the Miami Heat roster, which is slightly too much for a guy of his stature.
However, Waiters is in much better shape now as he took the fans jokes about his weight on social media as motivation to hit the gym. He showed off his new shredded, slimmer look in an Instagram post, captioning that he was in a “dark place mentally & physically” following his ankle injury.
“Now a days with this social media ran world they laughed at me made jokes etc not knowing what I was battling or going through everyday. So instead of me joining the circus, I told myself you from (Philly) you’ve been through worst s— in your life than this. So I promise myself I would work my ass off & get back to where I was before the injury. I’m not done yet but I kno somebody in the world prolli needed to hear this. Stay positive block out the outside noise & grind,” Waiters wrote in the post.
Miami Heat president Pat Riley said that Waiters practically played the previous season with one and a half ankles and that the team wanted him to lose weight so that his game improved.
“The surgery that he had was extensive. It wasn’t just to fix one part of his ankle. It was absolutely something more than that. And it took him a year,” Riley said. “But from a conditioning standpoint, [coach Erik Spoelstra] and I are right on the same page, whatever number he comes back at, I think it’s going to be to his benefit, and we’ll be able to see the explosiveness and he’ll be able to finish.
He’ll get to the rim a little more. But he was impacted by his ankle. And while he weighed in at numbers that were acceptable, that’s where the tightening of the screws will come into play. And it won’t be a single screwdriver. I’ll be using one of those Black & Deckers. It’s go hard.”
Even with his struggles with weight and the ankle injury, Dion Waiters managed to average 12 points, 2.8 assists, and 2.6 rebounds per game for the Miami Heat last season.
