We knew Marc Methot is out for the next few weeks with a “shattered finger” — and now we know what kind of repairs he got after he left the ice with a dangling pinky.
“To be clear we are talking about the left pinky,” said Nick Kypreos on Hockey Night in Canada’s Headlines segment. “The tip of it was severed. It took 10 stitches to put this thing back together again.”
On Coach’s Corner earlier in the evening, Don Cherry blamed the equipment more than Crosby for the gruesome injury and said it wasn’t an intentionally dirty play. Considering Crosby made the kind of contact that led to a severe result, it’s lucky Methot’s injury wasn’t even worse than it already was.
“The good news at least is it doesn’t appear that there was anything major outside the tip of the finger,” Kypreos said. “I’m talking arteries, I’m talking about a nerve, all of it is in tact it’s just a matter of whether it will take or not and they should know that in the next couple of weeks.”
The panel went on to discuss whether or not Crosby should have been suspended for the play, and Kypreos noted that it would be hard to suspend a player for something that has become commonplace in an NHL game.
However, he believes this is a standard the NHL should consider changing.
“Moving forward we gotta change this mentality,” Kypreos said. “I don’t care if it’s a baseball swing or one of those little short ones, if the result is an injury like we saw with Methot or a broken bone or a sprained wrist, whatever the case is, that needs to be suspendable.
Elliotte Friedman added: “One of the big player reactions this week was if he had hit his stick and the stick had broken he would have gotten a penalty, so they don’t understand why that isn’t a penalty.”
