Monday, March 05, 2012

Rask Likely Finished in the Regular Season

The Boston Bruins announced that they will be without Tuukka Rask for what could be the remainder of the regular season, as he has now been sidelined with an abdomen/groin strain. Rask was hurt on Saturday, having to leave the Bruins' game early with a lower-body injury and all of the tests have come back and none of them turned out to be all that positive.

The injury is expected to keep Rask out of the line-up for 4-to-6 weeks and with only five weeks left in the regular season, there is a good chance that he won't return until the playoffs.  The Bruins recalled Michael Hutchinson from Providence of the AHL and he will back-up Tim Thomas and also likely get a number of starts, making sure that Thomas remains fresh for the playoffs.

Rask hasn't been quite as busy as I'm sure he (or his poolies) would have liked this season, limited to only 1,289 minutes in the Bruins' crease this season, which works out to be 23 appearances.  In those 23 appearances, he put up 11 wins and 3 shutouts for 28 points, which is good enough for 235th in pool rankings, 38th among goalies.

ImplicationsIn the pool, this puts a pretty good damper on Ryan M.'s chances of cracking the top 10, not to say he had a lot of hope for gaining that sort of rank by the end of the season.  Ryan starts the week in 12th place, 36 points out of 10th.  The loss of a goalie for the rest of the year will hurt him terribly.

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