Tavares Suffers Concussion

Bad news for the New York Islanders, as they are still having very bad luck in the injury department. The Islanders have now lost the 2009 1st overall pick John Tavares to a mild concussion, which he suffered against the Dallas Stars on Saturday night.  The Islanders are calling it a mild concussion and that Tavares will be reevaluated on Monday, but no matter how severe the concussion is said to be, Tavares will now miss at least one week by league guidelines, if not more.

The Islanders really didn't help me out on the rest of the healthy scratches on Saturday night, as Bruno Gervais, Jack Hillen and Michael Grabner were all sitting against the Stars.  The Islanders defense has been documented here on the blog as being fairly deep through the Summer, so it was only a matter of time before we found out who the odd men out were going to be, but I thought that both Gervais and Hillen would be in good shape going in.  Grabner, on the other hand, is still a fairly new body in the mix, so he's just waiting to have enough practice under his belt before getting some game action, but that may come sooner than later with the new injury.

Tavares is the headline injury and he is the only one in this blog that is taking part in the draft at this point in the season.  Tavares joins the list of players that Stacey has on the injury/news page, which also includes Zach Boychuk, Erik Johnson (returned to the line-up last night) and Semyon Varlamov at the moment.  Stacey wasn't minding all of those names being on the list in the first couple days of the pool, but he's now fallen down to 7th in the standings and now would be a good time to get some of those names back in the active rosters.

All four Islanders in question in this blog post are all a part of the selection sheet this year, but being as though the Islanders are not really projected to be a high scoring team, there's a pretty good chance you were going to avoid picking them altogether.  This may be a wise plan, especially if they are going to be scratched these days.

Link to the Injury/News Page