Swiss Ice Hockey Federation announced<\/a> that Fiala suffered a lower-leg injury that will rule him out of the rest of the Olympics. A league source confirmed to The Athletic on Saturday that Fiala underwent surgery and will \u201clikely\u201d miss the remainder of the NHL season.<\/p>\nCanada\u2019s players joined their distraught opponents in tapping their sticks on the ice as Fiala was carted off.<\/p>\n
\u201cVery hard,\u201d Swiss forward Nico Hischier said. \u201cStuff like that is hard to watch. Kevin\u2019s a big part of our group. In hockey, stuff like that happens. But it\u2019s tough to watch and didn\u2019t look great. I hope it\u2019s better than it looked.\u201d<\/p>\n
Wilson has a reputation for delivering big \u2014 and occasionally injurious \u2014 hits. But this was a fluke play, as neither player was even trying to throw a hit in the final minutes of a blowout. \u201cThere was no intention, for sure,\u201d Hischier said.<\/p>\n
Wilson seemed a little shaken up afterward, too.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s the Olympic Games, and I feel terrible that he may not be able to keep playing,\u201d Wilson said. \u201cJust sending his family and him my best. You never want to see a guy go down \u2014 in a tournament like this, especially. Sucks for the country, for their team. Just wishing him a quick recovery.\u201d<\/p>\n
The incident left Los Angeles Kings and Canada defenseman Drew Doughty with mixed emotions. Canada had just put together an impressive win against a very good team \u2014 Switzerland is the second-ranked team in the world thanks to its back-to-back silver medals at the World Championship \u2014 but Doughty saw an important part of his NHL team go down.<\/p>\n
Fiala has 18 goals and 22 assists in 56 games with the Kings this season.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was tough to see,\u201d Doughty said. \u201cWish Kevin the best. Hopefully he\u2019s going to be fine quick. We need that guy on my team back home, big-time. That\u2019s not something I wanted, obviously, to happen. I\u2019m going to go find him right now and see how he\u2019s doing.\u201d<\/p>\n
The play conjured unfortunate memories of the Islanders\u2019 John Tavares injuring his knee during the Sochi Olympics in 2014, which cost him the rest of the season. The risk of injury is one of the reasons the NHL has been lukewarm to the idea of shutting down its season to accommodate the Olympics every four years.<\/p>\n
But the players feel the risk is clearly worth it for the chance to represent their countries and compete for Olympic gold.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think every single player is gonna tell you they want to come play,\u201d Doughty said. \u201cUnfortunately, that happened, but hopefully he recovers quick.\u201d<\/p>\n
It was a brutal day for Switzerland, which lost not only the game but three key players. Before Fiala was hurt, captain Roman Josi\u2019s defensive partner, Andrea Glauser, left the game with a concussion after taking a big hit from Canada\u2019s Connor McDavid. And former NHLer Denis Malgin also left the game with a shoulder injury suffered in the first period. Swiss coach Patrick Fischer said both will miss time, but it\u2019s unclear for how long.<\/p>\n
\u201cSome huge players for us,\u201d Josi said. \u201cPlayers that play big minutes and have big roles on this team. It was tough.\u201d<\/p>\n
On Saturday, Kings teammate Adrian Kempe spoke about Fiala after Sweden\u2019s 5-3 win over Slovakia.<\/p>\n
\u201cObviously it\u2019s sad and it sucks for him and for us (Kings). Sad for him,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s something that we\u2019ve been looking forward (to) our whole life coming to play here (in the Olympics) and going down like that, it\u2019s really tough for him personally and for us as a team, how much he means to our team back home in L.A. Yeah, just very unfortunate for him that it comes in a tournament like this that we\u2019ve been looking forward to playing in for so long. I feel for him.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u2014 Pierre LeBrun contributed to this report.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"MILAN \u2014 Tom Wilson never heard a scream. But once he detangled himself from Switzerland forward Kevin Fiala…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":459620,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5126],"tags":[5,186,1760,240,5303,793,145,5304,5302,54125,4,2602],"class_list":{"0":"post-459619","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-los-angeles-kings","8":"tag-hockey","9":"tag-kings","10":"tag-la","11":"tag-la-kings","12":"tag-lakings","13":"tag-los-angeles","14":"tag-los-angeles-kings","15":"tag-losangeles","16":"tag-losangeleskings","17":"tag-mens-olympic-ice-hockey","18":"tag-nhl","19":"tag-olympics"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nhl\/116079266688604844","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/459619","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=459619"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/459619\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/459620"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=459619"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=459619"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=459619"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}