Injury in Wild game sidelines centreman
ST. LOUIS The list of the walking wounded got a little bit longer for the Ottawa Senators on Tuesday morning.
Centre Filip Chlapik suffered an unspecified upper-body injury in the Senators’ 3-1 loss to the Minnesota Wild on Monday night and was out of the lineup for Tuesday night’s matchup with the St. Louis Blues at the Scottrade Center.
The Senators recalled Max McCormick from their American Hockey League affiliate in Belleville and he was supposed to suit up in St. Louis, but when his travel time wasn’t going to allow him to make it, the recall was cancelled. The club instead dressed defenceman Erik Burgdoerfer, who had been called up Monday.
“These guys are gladiators and they take a lot of beating, and I’d say 95 per cent they can take,” Senators head coach Guy Boucher said Tuesday morning. “They want to go the next day and they’re not the first guys that want to take themselves out. It’s the opposite and they’ll wait until the last second to say they can’t go.
“I think the kid (Chlapik) wanted to definitely play again and continue to find his way to the NHL, but I think he just couldn’t take it and it was clear that he couldn’t go, so he was honest at that point. That’s what we want from the players.”
Winger Mark Stone was still waiting for inflammation in one of his knees to go down, so he was not expected to play against the Blues either, but he hadn’t been ruled out for Thursday’s contest against the Boston Bruins.
“It’s not a structural problem — we have to wait for it to heal,” Boucher said. “It’s really an inflammation. He ran into the boards and there’s swelling. There’s less swelling ... there’s no use in having Stone go on one leg.”
If Stone doesn’t play Thursday, he should be ready for their Jan. 30 visit to Raleigh, N.C., to face the Carolina Hurricanes.