He is expected to miss eight weeks — so essentially, he is out for the season unless the Bruins go deep into the Stanley Cup playoffs.
Seidenberg suffered the injury on Saturday, when the skate of Maple Leafs forward Nikolai Kulemin slashed his forearm. Though the team originally thought he would be OK, Seidenberg tried to play on Monday in Washington, but after pregame warmups, he and the team decided otherwise.
According to Bruins head coach Claude Julien, Seidenberg remained in pain and went for a second opinion on Tuesday, when it was decided that surgery was the only option.
“I think in the morning, he felt pain, and obviously before the game we tried something with him, and in the warmup, he still felt pain,” Julien said. “In the short time I have known him, I think it is pretty obvious that he is a tough individual, so for him not to go, something was obviously wrong — and the diagnosis we got from Toronto was not the same diagnosis we got here.”
Within a span of two weeks, the Bruins have lost Andrew Ference, who is out until at least the end of the regular season with groin and hernia injuries, Mark Stuart, who is out for two weeks after surgery for cellulitis in his right pinkie finger, and now Seidenberg. On top of that, captain Zdeno Chara, whom Julien said will play Thursday night, is playing with a dislocated left pinkie finger and now a broken nose, suffered on Monday in Washington. Injuries have been the norm for the Bruins this season, but they realize they can’t feel sorry for themselves.
“Yeah, it is unfortunate,” Julien said. “You lose some pretty good players that have been good for us this year, and [now] another one goes down, but those are the type of things that you can’t control anymore, and we have to deal with what we can. We’ve played the last two games without them and they have held their own, so you have to go in and do the same thing here.”
The Bruins will now rely heavily on their remaining experienced defensemen: Chara, Dennis Wideman, Matt Hunwick and Johnny Boychuk, as well as rookies Adam McQuaid and Andrew Bodnarchuk. But Julien will expect the forwards to pick up more slack as well.
“It also means that our forwards are going to have to be really good and help out in our own end so we can spend the least amount of time in there,” Julien said. “It is a matter of buckling down and doing our job properly here to make it as easy as possible on our guys.”
