Less than a week into the NHL pre-season and the bodies are piling up.
Now, let’s not read too much into this. Injuries are very much part of this sport, as we all know, and there’s rarely a direct connection between this broken hand, that concussion or the other hamstring problem.
Still. The last few days have included a stunning flurry of injuries, and to important players. The list includes Pavel Datsyuk, Nathan Horton, Jordan Staal, Jonathan Drouin and Derek Stepan, all top six forwards on their respective teams.
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Now add that list to the group of players missing from pre-season lineups either because of off-season surgeries or summer training injuries. That includes Henrik Zetterberg, Evgeni Malkin, Milan Lucic, Mikael Backlund, Eric Staal, Drew Doughty, Jonathan Quick, Tyler Bozak, David Clarkson and Josh Harding, although the Minny goalie’s injury was of a different sort altogether.
What does all this mean? Probably nothing. But it does make you wonder about a few different issues:
The number of exhibition games: Do NHL teams really need this many? Do they really need camps of 60, 70 players, and rules that call for teams to dress lineups featuring enough players with designated NHL experience? Sure, players have to get ready for the season. But having Datysuk get nailed by Rob Scuderi on Monday night to cause a shoulder woe that will sideline him for 4-5 weeks sure won’t help the Russian wizard or his team get ready. Again, injuries occur in this sport. But what precisely is the need for all these exhibition games (other than revenue) when players essentially come to camp (sorry Connor Bleakley) in mid-season shape?
Expansion: When you see the off-season and early pre-season take this big a bite out of NHL lineups, it’s worth pausing to consider whether the league really can withstand another round of expansion by two or four franchises. That would necessitate as many as 92 more NHL players, and while that’s less than four players off existing teams, it’s still significant. It’s been 14 years since the last expansion, and you just have the feeling that talent has caught up with demand, although finding more than a dozen teams with two legitimate scoring lines can be a challenge. Then you get a bunch of injuries like this, and you realize that the talent pool may be more shallow than it seems. It’s clear the wild rumours of NHL expansion that surfaced in August were simply speculation, but still, expansion has to be on the minds of NHL governors and rarely has the talent pool been considered carefully when it comes to adding more teams.
The World Cup of Hockey: It’s a virtual certainty the World Cup will return in 2016 for the first time in 12 years, and there’s lots of reasons, mostly financial but also logistical, why the NHL and NHLPA will embrace this concept. It will involve eight countries and thus as estimated 120 to 140 NHL players, as some countries, notably Russia, will use players from other leagues. Still, it’s a competition that puts a strain on NHLers, putting them into a high level competition weeks before they would usually be facing live bullets. Again, the needs and demands on the talent pool are rarely considered when these kinds of concepts evolve, and it’s likely no more stressful to have Canada playing Sweden at the Air Canada Centre in mid-September than it is to have them facing off in South Korea in February. But when you have top players from top teams like Quick and Doughty clearly showing the strain of playing late into the spring (summer?) year after year, you do wonder just how much these players can take, and you wonder how the layers of competition, both league and international, might actually shorten careers. Moreover, the New York Islanders, who suffered the devastating loss of John Tavares in Sochi, would be one team that might suggest the risks of these events far outweigh the benefits.