SUSPENSIONS FINE WITH AILING STARS
washington » A one- game, slap- on- the- wrist suspension isn’t enough to stop NHL teams from keeping their banged- up players out of AllStar weekend.
The league said Thursday that Chicago captain Jonathan Toews won’t participate in All- Star festivities in Nashville after he left a game this week with an illness. That came one day after the Capitals’ Alex Ovechkin pulled out of All- Star weekend with a lower- body injury that the team said had been bothering him since November.
Ovechkin and Toews by rule are suspended for the first game after the All- Star break, the same punishment the Pittsburgh Penguins accepted last year with Sidney Crosby. The NHL’s rule was first used in 2009 against Detroit Red Wings stars Nicklas Lidstrom and Pavel Datsyuk, and now it has been levied against five of the league’s top players.
“We had to make a conscious decision on that,” Washington coach Barry Trotz said. “That’s the rules. You’ve seen other teams make that decision. I was out West, and Detroit’s made that decision a few times. The ultimate goal for us is to go deeper than we did last year, so sometimes you have to make those decisions. We made it. And we’ll just deal with it.”
Ovechkin and Toews have each appeared at a handful of All- Star Games, and the price of missing Tuesday’s game is insignificant compared with potential long- term ramifications.