FlyerFire
Registered User
Just a question. It seems catastrophic injuries surround this team for some reason going back to Barry Ashbee etc
Well it certainly may put a nail in the coffin of his career.But so many others, obviously Pronger, Lindbergh, Tertyshny come to mind
If we're trying to go into the hockey hall of fame of unlucky and horrible incidents then we're still firmly behind Lokomotiv Yaroslavl on that leaderboard.
If we're trying to go into the hockey hall of fame of unlucky and horrible incidents then we're still firmly behind Lokomotiv Yaroslavl on that leaderboard.
I doubt the Flyers are are any different from other organizations, it's just that we are all familiar with the injuries that took place. If you talk to fans from other organizations I'm sure you'd see that there are just as many for them. The Flyers seem to have a lot more catastrophic type of injuries/illnesses (Ashbee, Lindbergh, Tertyshny) but even with that I don't know the history of other teams. The Leafs have that Bill Barillko cat who died way back when. I'm sure there are others.
The Flyers got off to a tremendous start early in the season, sporting a gaudy 8-1-1 record through the first 10 games. After an ugly 8-4 loss at the Spectrum to Dailey’s old team, the Canucks, the Flyers headed to the Aud in Buffalo. Dailey, who had scored in the Canucks game, had six points and a plus-five rating heading into Buffalo.
With the Flyers’ trailing the Sabres 4-1 in the second period, Dailey raced Buffalo forward Tony McKegney for an icing touch up. Dailey never made it. Bumped from behind by McKegney, Dailey’s skate got caught in a rut in the ice and he fell backwards into the boards, shattering both his tibula and fibula.
“The ankle was busted on both sides. The bones were in a hundred pieces,” he recalled in The Greatest Players and Moments of the Philadelphia Flyers.
Dailey was carried off the ice on a stretcher and rushed to a local hospital.
Just 16 games into his first campaign, while playing against St. Louis, Watson chased a loose puck near the end of the ice. The Blues' Wayne Babych checked him against the boards, leaving the fallen rearguard with the worst broken leg in NHL history. His thighbone was shattered into 14 pieces and his kneecap was split in two. Watson's career on ice was over. He was lucky to escape with only a permanently disabled leg.
All franchises deal with players breaking down due to injury, but the Flyers have to be up there in terms of unexpected or sudden injuries that ended the careers of star players. I mean Lindros is probably the most famous example in NHL history of a legitimate generational talent just having his career completely destroyed by injury, and it's something that no one could have really predicted. There's Mario and his health concerns, but he was able to come back and still be a generational player. Most felt that Lindros was done from the moment that Stevens hit him. Primeau and his concussion was sudden and unexpected, Pronger too. Lindbergh's wreck was something that could have happened to anyone. Ashbee's injury was too.
I'm sure there are other franchise that can play the what-if game as well, but I have to believe that the Flyers are at or near the top of the list in terms of franchise altering injuries. They have been fairly healthy during the Richards/Carter and Giroux eras (outside of Pronger who was already on the back nine of his career), so maybe our luck is turning.