if you\u2019re familiar with the story of Bobby Ryan<\/a>, it\u2019s hardly a surprise that some adversity was no match for him.<\/p>\n\u201cIt ended up being a blessing in disguise for me. Clarke [MacArthur] was trying to find his way back [from a severe head injury], and nobody was really sure how that was going to look. I kind of just thought he was collecting a paycheck and coming to do the work, but he was working so hard,\u201d said Ryan.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo I’m like, \u2018there’s something going on,\u2019 you know. Like, I think he’s coming back, but nobody was quite sure. But I got to skate with him. I think [Chris Neil] hurt his hand, I got to skate with him. Shean Donovan [who was then the team\u2019s player development coach] was so clutch for me that year. He brings an energy to the room that is unmistakable every day.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd all the days where I was like, \u2018I have to do this drill again, but I can\u2019t really touch a puck, and I just have to skate?\u2019 Those were the guys. And my teammates were great. They never treated me any differently when [I] was injured, right? But when you\u2019re injured for four-to-six weeks, a couple times, it just sucks.\u201d<\/p>\n
Leading up to his time away from the team, Ryan said his hand could only be frozen \u201cso many times\u201d to help him grimace through the pain and play through the injury before he would have to stop and let it heal fully. At the heart of\u00a0those efforts was Dr. Donald Chow, the team\u2019s longtime physician who also doubled as the team\u2019s practice goaltender during those skates away.<\/p>\n
Daniel Alfredsson had returned to the team after retiring as a player, in the role of senior advisor of hockey operations. He was another participant in the practices with Ryan and the other injured Senators.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe eventually got to the point where I could do everything, but the guys were in the playoff push, and I wasn\u2019t 100 per cent. But I skated with those guys and did skill work. And competing with \u2018Neiler\u2019 every day, you\u2019re going to get killed. If you take a second off, that guy\u2019s going to kill you,\u201d said Ryan.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo I felt like I was in game mode at these practices. There were five guys on the ice, and we played two-on-two, and three-on-three when we could get the other guys mixed in, and it gave me the freedom to just explore the game again outside of the systems. I felt like I got so much better coming into playoffs, knowing that I was going to try to get back for it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Ryan was one of a few players who spent large chunks of the season away from the team.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Netminder Craig Anderson\u2019s wife Nicholle was diagnosed with throat cancer that October. Anderson began the season with the team, but stepped away in December to take care of her.<\/p>\n
MacArthur \u2014 who already had a long history of severe head injuries \u2014 suffered a concussion during training camp and was only cleared to play in time for the final four games of the regular season.<\/p>\n
Still, the Senators made the playoffs and even earned home-ice advantage in the first round of the playoffs thanks to their second-place finish in the Atlantic Division. While it would be misleading to say that the entire team was fully healthy, they were all available to play that postseason.<\/p>\n
\u201cBy the end, yeah, I knew \u2014 we all knew \u2014 [Erik Karlsson] was going through stuff with the ankle. I don\u2019t think anybody really knew the severity of it, but [Derick Brassard]\u2019s shoulder was a disaster. I remember that. And we\u2019d go into certain plays, and he\u2019d be like, \u2018I can\u2019t do this, or this\u2019, and you\u2019d be like, \u2018Okay, we\u2019ll work around it. We\u2019ll figure it out\u2019. I think [Mark Stone] was a little banged up too,\u201d said Ryan.<\/p>\n
\u201cBy the end, when you go through that, number one, you\u2019ve gone through 82 [games], right? So you\u2019re going to have guys banged up from that. But then you go into the playoff series, and I think one playoff series is equally as tough as half the season, honestly. Just the way the game changes, the way the speed and the body [contact] changes, the hitting and the physicality.<\/p>\n
\u201cI can\u2019t remember when they released the injury report, but every single guy had something, for the most part \u2014 aside from me, [laughs]. I was like, I\u2019m healthy, finally, but I remember my hands. I couldn\u2019t get my hands to open up. I\u2019m coming up on 40 now, and the arthritis that I have in my fingers is a direct result of those years. But every single guy in that playoffs run was injured at some point. But that\u2019s every team, right? You just get used to it.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"If Bobby Ryan\u2019s 2016\u201317 season with the Ottawa Senators ended in early April, it would be classed as…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":705181,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5113],"tags":[5,4,118,1469,100,5216],"class_list":["post-705180","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-pittsburgh-penguins","tag-hockey","tag-nhl","tag-penguins","tag-pittsburgh","tag-pittsburgh-penguins","tag-pittsburghpenguins"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nhl\/117571890913125402","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/705180","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=705180"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/705180\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/705181"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=705180"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=705180"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=705180"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}