Game #46: Minnesota Wild at Philadelphia Flyers, Tuesday January 17, 2012 at 6:00pm (CST), Wells Fargo Center [GAME PREVIEW]

  
A feature we added to the State of Hockey News this year to our game preview posts was a listing of injuries and as I was typing this one up it sort of made me wonder just how prevalent concussions are in the National Hockey League’s injury blotter.  Using TSN‘s NHL Injury tracker, out of the 122 players listed to have injuries, 26 (21.3%) are out with concussion or concussion-related issues.  Mind you, these were just the ones that stated it was a concussion.  I did not include the more inocuous and vague “head” injury or the even less descriptive “upper body injury” which may also mean they are suffering concussions.  If you toss those numbers (another 15 players in these sub-cateogories) into this equation then potentially you have 33.6% of the league’s injured players with some concussion related issue, for those of you who love fractions that’s basically 1/3rd.  Yet its tough to tell the precise figure with vague injury terminology being bantered about by many clubs (including the Wild) but suffice it to say its a significant number.  Players themselves are hesitant to be tagged with the ‘concussion’ label as we saw with the Toronto Maple Leafs forward Colby Armstrong who waited a few days before finally revealing he was suffering from concussion symptoms.  Or how about the angry reaction of former Wild defenseman Brent Burns had after he sat out the latter half of the 2008-09 season with a head injury (that was almost universally reported as a concussion) but upon his return he insisted that was not true and even though he was wearing a new helmet; the Mark Messier designed M-11 with the concussion issue in mind he minimized its effectiveness by saying it doesn’t really matter since the change of direction does all of the damage regardless what sort of helmet you have on anyways.  The sensitivity to concussions were raised when the NHL’s poster boy Sidney Crosby suffered a concussion during the Winter Classic that has kept him out of the Penguins lineup for about a full season to this point.  While most players agree that there is no way to fully eliminate concussions from the game, especially in a contact sport the new emphasis has been on eliminating the pointless hits to the head much in the same way the NFL has done. 

Just to put the injury situation into perspective, the Minnesota Wild disproportionately speaking, have suffered more than most teams as 3/5ths of its current list injured players are out with concussions, most notably Pierre-Marc Bouchard who missed over a full-season’s worth of games battling post-concussion syndrome.  Concussions have been even worse for the tonight’s opponent, the Philadelphia Flyers where 3 out of its 4 injured players are out with concussion problems; most notably Ian Laperriere who has been out for nearly 2 seasons already.  The head injuries and the push to eliminate dangerous hits now hits even closer to home as the Minnesota State High School League has implemented new, stricter rules for boarding in boys and girls hockey.  You can read all about the new rules in an article from the Minneapolis Star Tribune here.  These new rules are a reaction to the recent tragic injuries sustained by Benilde-St. Margaret’s Jack Jablonski and St. Croix Lutheran’s Jenna Privette on hits from behind. One does not have to look far to see how hot a topic this is at Minnesota rinks; just two weekends ago I was at my cousin’s Pee Wee game and the entire Sartell team had Jack Jablonski ‘In our Hearts’ stickers on the back of their helmets.  Even though the MSHSL has drawn outrage from the parents from Privette saying she simply fell rather than was the victim of a check from behind which you can read here.  Regardless of the controversy about whether she fell or not, the severity of Jablonski’s and Privette’s injuries have brought the issue of hitting from behind to the forefront of Minnesota’s hockey family, there are mixed feelings about MSHSL’s rule changes.  At of the time of the writing this article, a recent poll at the Minneapolis Star Tribune revealed that while a majority of the respondents (49%) said that that these rules were long overdue, 22% said that the rule changes were an overreaction.  The NHL has attempted to address these hits with its Safety Department headed by former NHL star Brendan Shanahan but the suspensions have drawn a lot of criticism for their inconsistency and with at least 21% out with concussions you could say there is a lot of room for improvement.  When you consider a few weeks before Bouchard was finally felled with another concussion, he was driven into the boards head first by Zach Bogosian who did not recieve any supplemental discipline from the league it makes you wonder if the league is playing a dangerous game of chicken with serious injuries like the ones that Jablonski and Privette sustained.  Every year, you hear about a player who sustained a serious injury that caused them to be either paraplegic or quadraplegic yet the NHL has avoided it for the most part.  Is it time for the NHL to be even more stringent with these dangerous hits? 

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  Are the Wild tough enough to defeat the Flyers?

As I filled in the stats to set up tonight’s game, it struck me that the Wild are without 2 of its Top 5 scorers in Mikko Koivu and Pierre-Marc Bouchard.  The loss of Koivu was very apparent after he left mid-way through the 1st period of Saturday night’s game in St. Louis.  The Wild struggled to fill that void on the top line and at times had Warren Peters centering Dany Heatley and Devin Setoguchi.  No offense to Peters’, but this line needs a more offensively skilled center to be effective especially since Setoguchi and Heatley are largely dependent on that player to set them up.  My guess is that Matt Cullen or perhaps Kyle Brodziak gets thrown into that role.  With this latest shakeup you can barely say the Wild has one legit scoring line. This makes the team vulnerable to be shut down offensively as they will be rolling 3 lines made up of minor league call ups and 4th liners.  Or Mikko Koivu could pull off his best Willis Reed impersonation and make the improbable comeback from what appeared to be a left shoulder injury.  Either way, the Wild will be hard pressed to compete offensively going against one of the more offensively explosive teams in the league led by Claude Giroux, Scott Hartnell, Jaromir Jagr, and Daniel Briere.  This will necessitate some of those role players stepping up and chipping in offensively much the way David McIntyre, Casey Wellman, and the aforementioned Warren Peters have done in recent games. Dare I say it, the team could always hope its blueline chip in a goal too (cough Marek Zidlicky cough).  Then again, hell could freeze over too?!?!

What has me just as concerned as the Wild’s Missing In Action offense is the play of its defense.  Like St. Louis the Flyers have a lot of hard-nosed forwards who love to go to the net and cause havoc near the crease.  Josh Harding or whoever else is between the pipes will be seeing a lot of orange and white sweaters near their crease for much of the game.  This means that Minnesota’s defenseman must be physical and be mean to keep the Flyers from more or less making a permanent settlement in the blue paint.  If the Wild need an example of how mean they should be, they should take a lesson from Justin Falk.  Falk set a tone early when he obliterated the Blues’ David Perron in the 1st period.  Sure, this caused a lot of sparks but Falk consistently battled, being both mean and physical in the defensive zone and that was important to giving the Wild and Josh Harding a chance to see pucks in order to come away with at least a mercy point.  Falk can’t do it all by himself and some of the other defenseman; most notably Mike Lundin, Greg Zanon, Marek Zidlicky, Nick Schultz need to play with more edge to their game, far too much hacking and chopping with the stick and not enough play of the body in my opinion.  Hopefully Clayton Stoner doesn’t hurt an officials’ feelings the way he did with NHL referee Brad Meier who tagged him with an extra unsportsmanlike penalty after a pretty marginal call in the first place at the end of the 2nd period. 

The Wild need to use its adversity as a source of strength and not an excuse.  I know it sounds cheesy, but the truth is the team is not going to get any sympathy from Philadelphia this evening.  Flyers Head Coach Peter Laviolette won’t tell his players, “Hey guys, they’re without Bouchard, Latendresse and Koivu, let’s take it easy tonight.”  The Flyers will gladly run up the score on anyone, especially a team outside of its conference.  Minnesota needs to play with urgency, with a ton of heart and a lot of energy (perhaps a big bag of knuckles too to quote the movie Mystery, Alaska).  After having spent the last few days back in St. Paul the guys that are healthy should be rejuvenated enough to put out a helluva an effort.  As Wild Head Coach Mike Yeo has correctly stated, “Its not about them or the injuries, its about what we’re doing.  We need to get over that.” The Wild’s most formidable obstacle may be what they believe they can do.  Hopefully they will be able to bury the excuses and focus solely on taking it to the Flyers.        

Injury Report:

Minnesota:     Jarod Palmer (concussion), Guillaume Latendresse (concussion), Pierre-Marc Bouchard (concussion, groin), Niklas Backstrom (illness), Mikko Koivu (upper body injury, left shoulder)    

Philadelphia:  Ian Laperriere (concussion), Blair Betts (bone bruise, out indefinately), Chris Pronger (concussion, knee out for the season), James VanRiemsdyk (concussion) 

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