Injury Report: Niklas Backstrom "Shut Down" for the Season

[youvegotit]

This is really good news. We really wrecked him by riding him into the ground at the end of last season. Hopefully now he will do the smart thing and have surgery to repair everything, and have a full offseason to heal up and see if maybe he's still useful as a goalie next year.

^ this... got to feel bad for the guy. I still think he has some good hockey left in him, probably not enough to be worth his contract, but he deserves the chance to get healthy.

And as much as the NHL is a business, the guy has done everything asked of him and by all accounts is a well respected player/teammate, it's only right we handle this situation properly, even if it might appear to hinder us somewhat in the short term. Imo it's far more important for the team going forward to keep the players respect and maintain an atmosphere where players want to play for our team, then save a few million bucks and throw a player under the bus.

Kinda like Heatley this year. Everyone knows he's not worth 7.5 million, but instead of management making that bad situation even worse we seem to be getting the best value we possible can for what he has left. It's not an ideal situation but for a smaller market like we have it's important in maintaining the locker room and our hopes in luring quality free agents.

 

[Avder]

It's not just last year where we rode Backstrom too hard. I can remember a couple years where we were out of the playoff race, Backs was known to have been dealing with a nagging injury, and we stupidly kept playing him rather than shutting him down and letting him start healing for next season.

 

[DANOZ28]

This is really good news. We really wrecked him by riding him into the ground at the end of last season. Hopefully now he3 will do the smart thing and have surgery to repair everything, and have a full offseason to heal up and see if maybe he's still useful as a goalie next year.

i have to agree with that, i know some people think we made a mistake re-signing backs but not me. he was low risk that got injured. imo.

 

[tyratoku]

Regarding the title of this thread, it's Niklas not Nicklas.

Nicklas is the Capitals forward, Niklas is our goalie.

Small nitpick loser I am.

 

[Jarick]

Thanks for the heads up, rookie mistake

 

[Lempo]

Regarding the title of this thread, it's Niklas not Nicklas.

Nicklas is the Capitals forward, Niklas is our goalie.

Small nitpick loser I am.

That actually is a very important and useful pointer on a matter I was myself troubling myself over today.

Also, I must applaud your skillful avoidance of using their last name in the message for other genuine nitpickers to make a case of the Scandi letters, which are not a and o with umlauts but real genuine distinct letters found only on the keyboards of, ermh, special people.