The hits keep on coming for the Black and Gold on defense.
The Bruins are set to be without their captain for an extended stretch, as the team announced Saturday night that Zdeno Chara suffered an MCL injury in his left knee and will be re-evaluated in four weeks.
Chara suffered the injury during Wednesday’s loss against the Avalanche, with the 41-year-old defenseman exiting the game at the end of the first period after his knee appeared to buckle while slamming into Carl Soderberg.
Might be the play where Chara went down with an injury. Not a good look on that knee. pic.twitter.com/EuYblCreVX
— Conor Ryan (@ConorRyan_93) November 15, 2018
Chara is just the latest in the growing list of Bruins to go down with an injury, joining a battered blue line that includes
Charlie McAvoy
(concussion-like symptoms),
Kevan Miller
(hand),
Brandon Carlo
(upper-body injury),
Urho Vaakanainen
(concussion) and
John Moore
(lower-body injury).
Already without Chara for an extended stretch, the B’s suffered another blow up front during Friday’s OT loss to the Stars, with
Patrice Bergeron
exiting the game for a stretch in the second period after getting slammed into the boards by
Radek Faksa
.
While Bergeron returned to game action, he was clearly favoring his left shoulder following the play — eventually moving to the wing in the third period to avoid taking draws at the faceoff dot. Sure enough, both Bergeron and Moore were sent back to Boston on Saturday to undergo further testing by team doctors.
“Upper body,”
Bruce Cassidy
said after Friday's game. “He’ll be evaluated obviously, better, in the morning. Right now, he was having a tough time finishing, so it would lead me to believe he’d have a tough time playing (Saturday), but he’s also a tough guy. So we’ll see how it is. He does have a few days in between games. There’s that to look at. But at the end of the day, we have to find out the extent of the injury and go from there.”
BSJ Analysis
He has continued to defy critics and hold onto his standing as a top-pairing defenseman since moving into his 40s, but even with his fantastic conditioning, the concern had to be there that a major knee injury could sideline the future Hall of Famer for good.
With his reported timetable for a recovery (4-6 weeks), Chara is largely in the same boat that
Charlie McAvoy
was in last season when he missed almost the entire month of March due to an MCL sprain.
But, as
Dr. Jessica Flynn
, there was a chance for additional complications in Chara’s left knee, given the fact that he suffered a PCL injury in the same leg during the 2014 season.
But what’s the plan in the immediate for the Bruins’ battered defense?
In fact, if you take away an impressive effort by
Tuukka Rask
in net on Friday, the numbers are there that Boston’s D corps has been exposed early and often since Chara went down.
If that trend continues, it’s going to be up to Rask
and
Jaroslav Halak
to make quite a few Grade-A stops in order to keep their teams in games.