At the club's breakup day at the Garden on Friday, Bergeron revealed just how much he was hurting.
Bergeron suffered an injury to his oblique muscle. He said it was either a tear or a strain, but had not undergone an MRI to determine exactly which. Either way, the prescription is the same. He needs time and rest to recover, two commodities in precious short supply in the NHL postseason.
"There’s no surgery, it's just rest and time to heal," Bergeron said. "Obviously if it would have been in the [regular] season, I wouldn't have played. I would have probably taken two and a half weeks off, healed and been fine. It's just one of those things where it's just time, but we didn't have that [in the playoffs]."
Bergeron's injury wasn't revealed until Game 5 of the series, when the pain became too much to bear in the third period after absorbing big hits from Washington forwards Alexander Semin and Alex Ovechkin. But it wasn't those hits that caused the injury. That actually occurred a couple games earlier.
"It happened in Game 3 and it got worse in Game 5, obviously as everyone knows, in the second period,” Bergeron said. "It was not related to those two hits that everyone thinks. The Semin hit broke my nose, but that was it. The Ovechkin hit was just, I was already hurt so it just hurt even more, but it didn't make [the injury] any worse. In the third period I couldn't go and in the last two games I was playing at probably 60 percent of what I usually am."
Bergeron noted that playing through the pain wasn't making the injury worse, but it was preventing it from healing at all.
"It was not getting better,” Bergeron said. "The thing with these things is you need time to rest, and when you don't do that I do'’t think it got worse, but it couldn't really get better."
Had the Bruins beaten Washington, Bergeron wasn't sure how much longer he would have been able to play. He would likely have been shut down for at least a couple games to give the oblique some time to heal.
"I could have [kept playing], but at some point, I don't know," Bergeron said. "It was just really frustrating. I don't know if we would have made a decision to take the first game or the first two games of the second series and try to calm everything down and come back better or just keep going with that."
Bergeron had already seen his game limited by the injury. He did not take faceoffs in the final two games and spent much of his time on the wing, a frustrating adjustment for one of the game's best two-way centers and top faceoff men.
"It's hard," Bergeron said. "I'm used to that, I'm used to being in there [on draws]. It gets me going. Positioning-wise, it's different on the wing. Sometimes we were switching and I was going down low, but down low I really couldn't battle or reach out for pucks, stuff like that. I really needed to adjust my game a lot. I was trying not to think about it, but it's there. I'm not the only one to go through that stuff, playoffs especially. It's just one of those things."
Bergeron's injury may have come into play in a crucial turning point in overtime of Game 7. He had a chance at an open net on a rebound early in sudden death, but couldn't put the shot on net. The Capitals then counterattacked and Joel Ward banged home a rebound at 2:57 to end the series.
"[Bergeron] had a strained oblique and he was very debilitated from taking faceoffs as you saw," Bruins general manager Peter Chiarelli said. "And I believe, I don't think Bergy would ever say it, but I believe that last chance in overtime that he couldn't stretch for it because of the oblique. He was in a lot of pain."
The pain of Wednesday's loss will remain for a while for Bergeron, but at least he will now finally get the rest needed to ease the agony in his oblique.
Have a question for Douglas Flynn? Send it to him via Twitter at @douglasflynn or send it here. He will pick a few questions to answer every week for his mailbag.
