DENTAL PLAN
Missing teeth won’t keep Vesey out vs. Blackhawks
There are a handful of ways to describe what happened to Jimmy Vesey on Saturday afternoon at the Garden — disgusting, gruesome, extremely painful, cringeworthy.
Then there is this description of Vesey’s appearance, coming from coach Alain Vigneault:
“Looks like a hockey player. Beautiful young man.”
That was Vigneault after Monday’s practice, one day after Vesey finally had his two front teeth removed from his bottom lip. They were lodged there for all of Saturday’s third period, which he played with a full fishbowl cage on after taking the toe of a skate from Oilers forward Zack Kassian to his face early in the second. After the game, the doctors undid the stitching that had stopped the bleeding, removed the teeth, and stitched him up again.
Vesey then went to the dentist Sunday and got what he called “a couple root canals.” He sat on the couch the rest of the day, then returned to practice Monday, as he awaits the swelling in his lip to subside before going back to the dentist to get caps put on the stubs left of his two front teeth.
Quite a few days for the 23-yearold out of Harvard, who tweeted about it while adding the hashtag #SorryMa. A somewhat traumatic experience, but not one that will keep Vesey from playing when the Rangers bring a six-game winning streak into Chicago to face the Blackhawks on Wednesday night.
“It’s almost like I saw the skate coming in slow motion but couldn’t move out of the way,” Vesey said with a slight lisp. “Hit me pretty hard square in the face. I knew right away my teeth were gone. I guess the nerve was exposed and when I was breathing, just air hitting the nerve was really sensitive and painful.”
Now in his second year in the league after signing with the Rangers as a free agent and reigning Hobey Baker Award winner, it’s been a while since Vesey wore the big cage. He will don it again versus the Blackhawks and is unsure for how many games after. Vesey hardly seemed fond of doing it, no matter his past success wearing it.
“Yeah, it feels horrible now to go back to it,” he said. “Bulkier and you can’t really look down. When the puck’s at your feet, you can’t see it. That’s definitely different. I don’t think I’ll be in it very long.”
It was hard to tell exactly what happened when Vesey went down, but when he got up off the ice, his mouth was covered in blood. He missed the final 16:36 of the second period, and returned from the locker room just before the puck dropped for the third period.
“I knew I was getting some sort of stitches when I was leaving,” Vesey said. “They had to remove my teeth, I didn’t know what the deal was going to be, but once we got in there, the thing that delayed it a little bit was the X-rays. Luckily enough they saw my teeth were in my lip.”
The Rangers aren’t exactly overflowing with depth up-front, so it’s a good thing Vesey wasn’t more seriously injured. More than anything, he was lucky not to catch the skate blade rather than just the toe of Kassian’s boot. Vesey’s line with David Desharnais and J.T. Miller has been effective during this stretch of winning, which has stabilized the Rangers’ season after a dreadful start.
And surely Vesey won’t be feeling great when he gets on the ice in Chicago, but playing through pain is just as much a part of being in the NHL as fake front teeth.