What's going on with Erik Karlsson?

[Seb]

He's most likely playing at 35% right now

 

[Deen]

Probably needs to play D like Burns

 

[swiftwin]

Muscles don't grow out of thin air. His foot was in a cast and couldn't work out all summer. He couldn't do training camp either. He lost some speed. He will slowly get it back as the season progresses.

 

[Tomas W]

The few times I watched him he did not look good. But its probably a slump, due to the latest injury.

 

[Korpse]

are we sure he didn't have his leg amputated? I mean look how he played on a broken foot, for an injury to be the cause of his slump it would need to be pretty significant. My guess is he's just getting acclimated to having a new partner, along with a bit of a slump team wide.

It's pretty obviously watching him on a nightly basis that he doesn't have the jump that he would usually have, on top of that he's been pretty open about the fact that it is something he's dealing with. I'm not sure the exact nature of his surgery but Karlsson himself has said he had a piece of bone replaced with something he equated to a piece of leather. You can look back to before this losing streak when Ottawa was scoring plenty of goals, Karlsson had 17 points in 11 games but I dont think you would find anyone saying there aren't any side effects from off season surgery.

when do we turn the pitchforks to ottawa's trainers and management for allowing him to absolutely wreck his ankle and sacrifice his long-term health for a few playoff wins last season? cause i don't even like the guy and i'm outraged at the fact that no one said "no, we're not allowing you to play any more"

It's easy to stand back and say that now, but there's really no guarantee that it would be any different had he not played, he very well could have required the same surgery had he not played. We also don't know the long term effects, short term it's something that he has to deal with, thats really nothing new a return from surgery especially when a player is unable to train.

This isn't the first time that we've been through a situation like this with Karlsson. IIRC when he returned so quick from his achilles injury, theres was a lot of questions similar to now. Thats not to say it is a guarantee that Karlsson is going to come out of it just fine but its a little early to bring out the pitchforks.

 

[Silencio]

He's always been a slow starter (granted, not this slow). I expect he'll be back to his usual dominant self in January.