ShareThisBy JIM ALEXANDER
The Press-Enterprise
Thursday, May 10, 2007
Anaheim Might Ducks star Teemu Selanne's face has collected so many stitches lately, it's worth an extra look to make sure he doesn't have Bud Selig's signature on his forehead, too.
Bumps here. Bruises there. A little swelling, a little blood, more than a little scar tissue.
"(Stuff) happens," he said.
That's one way to look at it. But here's another: This is the face of playoff hockey, in all its gory glory.
It's the culture of this sport. It's a heritage embodied in Bobby Baun, who returned to a Stanley Cup Finals Game 6 after breaking his ankle _ and scored a game-winning goal in overtime, for Toronto over Detroit in 1964.
Many since then have honored that code, playing in pain and without complaint. Pittsburgh's Mario Lemieux played in the 1992 Finals with a broken hand. Detroit captain Steve Yzerman basically had one good leg in the 2002 Finals.
The stoicism reaches comic proportions at this time of year.
Teams will say a player is having problems with an "upper body injury" or a "lower body injury." No way will you provide your opponents with a road map, because if they know your guy has a bad hand, they'll take a shot at it.
During the Ducks' previous series, the running joke was that Vancouver players with broken bones and strains and pulls were laid low by the flu.
"The flu seems to be leaving," Coach Alain Vigneault said before Game 4.
"Upper body flu or lower body flu?" asked a questioner.
Even Vigneault laughed, knowing no one believed his subterfuge but feeling obligated to go along with it anyway.
More than occasionally a player will ignore aches and pains that he maybe shouldn't.
"You can say that all season long, but it's probably more magnified in the playoffs because there's just so much more at stake," Ducks defenseman Chris Pronger said.
"You want to be there for your teammates. You want to be there competing and playing for your team. A lot of times there are little nagging things where maybe in the regular season you might take a couple of games off and let them heal. But here you could be a game away from being defeated, or two games away."
The coach can be caught in the middle, balancing long-term health issues against a desire to get that player back in the lineup.
"Coaches like to put a lot of pressure on injured players," Anaheim's Randy Carlyle said, discussing Todd Marchant's return from surgery to repair a sports hernia. "He's felt my wrath. I'll say, 'When are you coming back?' Or, 'Don't bother the regulars.' It's in jest, but ...
"If a player tells you he's available and feels he can make a contribution, sometimes you take the percentages. If it's a Mario Lemieux or a Wayne Gretzky at 50 percent, is he better than a (average) guy at 100 percent? Those are the questions you have to ask."
Anaheim may be risking rust with another long layoff between rounds, but this could also be considered healing time. Center Sammy Pahlsson, for example, took three days off this week for what Carlyle cryptically called "maintenance days."
"It's just good to get a couple of days off, to take the chance that we have to heal a little," Pahlsson said. "It's just a little wear and tear. That's what happens in the playoffs. You play the full season, play a lot of games, then play all the time in the playoffs. Guys get worn down."
Or sometimes just unlucky.
Selanne, for example, was hit in the face by a puck during warm-ups before Game 5 of the Minnesota series, although some Ducks people darkly hint that with all the bad blood surrounding that series, it wasn't an accident but was actually a puck shot from the Minnesota end of the ice.
Then Selanne got clipped in the face four times by sticks over the next five games, once by his own teammate, Pronger.
Imagine if Selanne didn't wear a visor.
"Hey, it's a good look for him," Pronger joked.
"What can you say? He got hit five games in a row and hasn't skipped a beat. That's pretty impressive, to battle through the things he has and not miss a shift. That's a good role model for the younger guys."
After all, they've only heard the stories about Baun and Lemieux and Yzerman, handed down through the years. But one look at Selanne's face makes the point far more vividly.
In this sport, at this time of year, pain is no more than an inconvenience.
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
