The Philadelphia Flyers sadly announced the fatal injury of one of their top players.
Hockey health can be so subjective, particularly when it comes to persistent injuries.
Right now, most people seem to agree that the best course of action for the Flyers during their recuperation is to be patient.
It’s widely acknowledged that the team needs to significantly reduce the amount of man-games lost due to injury in order to improve this season. They ended the previous season with the third-highest total in the NHL, but a large portion of that was attributed to Sean Couturier and Cam Atkinson’s year-long absences due to previous injuries.
With the way he handled defenseman Rasmus Ristolainen’s injury at the beginning of the season, head coach John Tortorella sort of gave away his position.
Until game day, there was no decision made regarding his availability for Thursday night’s season opener in Columbus.
It seemed that there was no compelling reason to hurry him back.
It turns out that the injury was to Ristolainen.
The coach didn’t want to try to use the injured player for one game and then lose him for the next three, as Tortorella noted regarding any kind of injury.
The Flyers had developed a reputation over the years, and even before Tortorella took over, for trying to “rush” injured players back into the starting lineup.
This season, the Flyers seem to want to adopt a more laid-back, realistic approach, with no explicit goal of qualifying for the playoffs.
Tortorella stated on Wednesday, “We didn’t have a meeting with how we’re doing this with injuries.” “Our medical staff has advanced significantly, in my opinion. We’ve made adjustments, added new personnel, and enlisted the assistance of even more people.
“The most important thing I advise the players to do is to accept that they are sore. You are injured, if you are. And that’s where the difference lies. You just have to play through soreness sometimes. A wound is an injury. We just don’t want this one (Ristolainen) to bother us.”
Some players were feeling more than a little sore after an extremely hard training camp. Even though Atkinson is one of the toughest guys around, he needed to take a few games off to fully recuperate from the challenging skating drills.
However, most of the Flyers were healthy for the first game of the regular season, and Tortorella wants to maintain that.
“We’re not doing anything unique here,” Tortorella emphasized. Our goal is to maintain the best possible health for our athletes. Additionally, let them know that there is a distinction between hurt and soreness.
resuming a previous rivalry
Since Peter Laviolette was fired almost ten years ago, the Flyers and the Rangers have played each other several times with various teams. However, now that Laviolette is coaching the New York Rangers, the rivalry is expected to heat up a bit.
Every time the two teams get together since then, it’s been an especially memorable evening. Laviolette has managed the benches in Nashville and Washington after leaving his position as coach of the Flyers. Along with winning a Stanley Cup with the Carolina Hurricanes in 2006, he also performed admirably in his NHL debut with the New York Islanders.
With just five games played, Scott Laughton is the only player still with the Flyers from the Laviolette era. However, there’s that—at least a few Flyers players are aware that Laviolette was the previous head coach to lead the club to the Stanley Cup Final. Additionally, when Laviolette and the Blueshirts play a Black Friday match at the Wells Fargo Center on November 24, a sizable number of seasoned fans will be present in the stands. For that one, there ought to be a lot of emotion in the building.
