The Times Herald (Norristown, PA)
Ghost
tisbehere said Monday after his first full practice since Jan. 8. “I was in my house the whole time, and thankfully, I’ve got a great fiancee to take care of me . ...
“The mental part of the quarantine was harder than the physical part for myself; thankfully, the symptoms didn’t hit me too hard. I was (down) for three or four days with cold-like symptoms and other things, but just dealing with it mentally for two weeks ... you know, you’re stuck in your house.”
That hit Gostisbehere perhaps harder than it might some of his teammates, if only because he’s felt a bit stuck over the past couple of seasons from injury and performance standpoints. Gostisbehere went from playing at a premier level in the 2017-18 season to slowly losing his top-pair status and top-unit power play role over the next year-plus, before two arthroscopic knee procedures knocked him out of the lineup altogether for long stretches last season.
All the while, he was wellknown trade bait on the GM hotlines across the league.
Finally, when the league called a mid-January start to a 56-game season, “Ghost” came out flying for pre-camp skates and pronounced himself healthy for the first time in a long time. It didn’t last long.
“For the last couple of years I’ve dealt with some adversity on and off the ice, with injuries and other crap,” Gostisbehere said. “I think for myself it’s just a little more salt in the wound. I was dealing with a little more than the hockey aspect during the time I was quarantining, watching your team play, seeing them win and seeing them lose; it sucks. You want to be out there.
“I’d had a really good camp and I was going to get a great opportunity. Now, hopefully I can just leave off where I was and get back in the swing of things.”
Gostisbehere does have a window for a return, since the pairing of Justin Braun and top defender Ivan Provorov has had mixed results, and top-4 defenseman Phil Myers is out with a fractured rib.
As it turns out, freeagent pickup Erik Gustafsson has had some rough outings over the team’s slowerthan-it-appears 3-2-1 start, and might need to sit for a game to think things over.
“It’s a new environment for him, a new group of players; you always need a little bit of time to adjust,” Flyers coach Alain Vigneault said of Gustafsson. “I don’t think he’s quite found his game yet, that puck-moving, steady defenseman that can help us spend a little less time in our zone.
“He believes he can play much better than he has so far.”
Until then, though, there is a 27-year-old former team star itching to show what he knows about himself, too. Vigneault indicated he might choose to put Gostisbehere in the lineup ahead of Gustafsson if he seems physically ready for the assignment.
“He did tell me not to rule him out,” Vigneault said.
That’s a lesson the past couple of weeks, and past couple of years, has taught Gostisbehere.
“It definitely is real, I’ll tell you that,” he said of his bout with the coronavirus. “If we can just follow the rules, like anything in this world, hopefully we can get through this and we can stop talking about it and help the people who have to deal with it. There’s health care workers out there who battle it every day and for us to do our part and just put a mask on, I don’t think it’s too hard.”
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Sean Couturier, whose absence has been felt at both ends of the ice, skated informally Monday but still faces at least several more days of healing a rib cartilage tear.
“I haven’t really set a timetable, but I’m feeling better,” said Couturier, who was injured 96 seconds into the Flyers’ second game when Pittsburgh’s Jared McCann popped him. “I’m just trying to stay in as good a shape as I can. Today was a step forward by skating and trying to get my game shape back together.”
Couturier still hasn’t put it together how the injury happened.
“It was one of those hits I take every game,” he said. “I probably have taken over 1,000 of those hits in my career and I’ve gotten hit a lot harder before and nothing happened.”