Harsh news for the Tampa Bay Lightning and one of their top players, as Martin St. Louis will be out for an indefinite period of time after suffering facial and nasal fractures in an incident in practice on Thursday morning. During drills, St. Louis took a backhand to the face from a teammate, which forced him out of the remainder of the practice and also caused him to miss Thursday night's contest against the Rangers. Thursday night's game was also supposed to be his 500th consecutive game played, a significant ironman streak has now come to an end, thanks to a freak injury.
St. Louis will be evaluated further this week, when the swelling goes down, to determine how long he will be out for. I would imagine that when he returns, likely sooner than later, he'll be wearing a full face shield to protect the soft area.
St. Louis hasn't exactly been setting the Southeast Division a blaze with his scoring this season, only amassing 9 goals and 13 assists in 27 games, which is nowhere near the usual point-per-game pace we have gotten to know from him, but the Lightning as a whole have seen their own struggles, which can somewhat explain what is going on here. Still, St. Louis is still ranked 66th among all players in pool scoring and that is a lot of offense to be missing out on in your line-up.
St. Louis was Benson G.'s 1st round pick in the draft this year, which makes him a fairly big disappointment for him to this point in the season. The 22 points St. Louis has picked up so far is only 4th on his pool team in scoring and a telling statistic when you seen Benson sitting in 10th place in the pool standings at the moment. Benson currently stands 19 points out of 4th place, the last money spot, and now missing out on St. Louis for a little while will hurt him terribly.
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