The Canadian | Arber Xhekaj wants to choose his fights

It’s Easter Monday, the Canadiens players have stocked up on chocolate, the sun is shining on Brossard and the start of the new BIXI season is upon us. So many reasons for Arber Xhekaj, Juraj Slafkovsky and Kaiden Guhle, the wounded who came to meet the journalists, to be enthusiastic.

And excited they were. ” That’s exciting. We have a lot of young talent here, guys in junior and college too. The future is bright in defense, on offense too, and it will be interesting to follow,” said Guhle.

“The future is exciting,” added Xhekaj.

This is fair and good, but it is still necessary that these players of the Canadiens of tomorrow can play so that “tomorrow”, precisely, arrives more quickly. The Canadian’s today is reflected in great beatings at this difficult end of the calendar, and the numerous injuries mean that these defeats do not even serve as experience for the team’s main hopes.

Take Xhekaj, the boot camp revelation. Never fished out, he landed in town with the confidence of a young first. He was logically expected in the American League, but injuries (yes, that again) to veterans Michael Matheson and Joel Edmundson opened the door for him.

Among his feats of arms, everyone will remember his fight with Zack Kassian. His toughness also showed in the hits column (159.2^e among NHL rookies at the time of injury). But he had shown unsuspected skills with the puck, collecting 13 points.

However, that ended after 51 games. On Feb. 12, he fought Edmonton Oilers defenseman Vincent Desharnais and suffered a right shoulder injury in the brawl.

We feel Xhekaj torn on the question of the fights. “It will not change my approach,” said the colossus of Hamilton first, before qualifying his thinking.

“But I’ll have to think about it more, think more about my long-term career, in due time, and remember that I don’t really have to prove myself anymore. I think I did. I will continue to be robust and it will happen what will happen. My injury, it was just a freak incident. »

Xhekaj also assures that his injury was the result of a single incident, and not an accumulation. “I practice a fairly robust style, it wears out the shoulders and they are not perfect. But that’s what hockey is: knees and shoulders. »

Slafkovsky had a first warning

The question of the accumulation of incidents arises, because this is precisely what happened with Cole Caufield, who had mentioned two separate impacts (December 23 and January 3) to his right shoulder, before declaring package and have surgery.

Juraj Slafkovsky remembers having suffered a nasty fall on January 14 against the New York Islanders. The Canadian was playing the next day at Madison Square Garden and that’s where he injured his left knee, on a seemingly innocuous sequence.

“On Saturday I fell and my leg turned the wrong way. And the next day, I fell the other way. I guess I had something wrong from the day before, ”said the 19-year-old.

North America’s first season as the first overall pick in the last draft therefore ended after 39 games, significantly fewer than the 85 games he had played in 2021-22, season and playoffs in Finland, and at the international for Slovakia.

Guhle was more stingy with details. “It was an injury in itself, not related to my other injuries,” he said.

The team’s 2020 first-round pick took a nasty fall in the strip on March 16 in Florida. He had then retired to the locker room before returning later in the match, but has not played since.

Diagnosis: sprained left ankle. It was also in the left leg that he was injured at the end of December, falling under the weight of Aleksander Barkov. His season lasted 44 games.

The players interviewed on Monday all cited “bad luck” as the reason why the Habs will end the season as the most mortgaged team in the NHL. Players have missed 575 injury games this season, according to NHL Injury Viz.

“There’s really no way to avoid running into the boards like that and having a player fall on you,” Guhle said.

A hockey man consulted last month had raised the hypothesis that the presence of many first-year players could have contributed to thickening the Canadian’s medical record. Slafkovsky, Xhekaj and Guhle may be tough, but they were experiencing the rigors of an NHL schedule for the first time.

“The schedule is tough, but a lot of our injuries have nothing to do with it,” Slafkovsky said. We were just unlucky. These things don’t happen with other teams. I hope it only happens to us once. »

Players may call it bad luck, but when a team is hit this hard two years in a row, it becomes irrational to call it bad luck. The off-season promises to be interesting, if the administration makes changes to this effect.