Montreal Canadiens forward Brendan Gallagher had another frustrating season from a health standpoint, though it was a new series of injuries rather than old issues flaring up.
“In Game 12 against Vancouver, I broke my ankle at the time,” said Gallagher. “Played with it, figured out it wasn’t working. Tried to take a month off, and by all accounts, it was taken care of and healed, but unfortunately, it wasn’t. Tried to play through it again.”
Gallagher admitted he broke his ankle again shortly after returning to play for the Canadiens.
“It’s unlucky to break something twice. You usually break a bone and it heals, but that didn’t happen. On the positive side, everything I dealt with in the past was fine. Hard to say when it happened again, maybe it wasn’t totally fused. I don’t know to be honest. It’s just unfortunate, a little unlucky, and incredibly frustrating.”
The injury took its toll on Gallagher’s mental health, especially since he was finally starting a season with a clean bill of health, a rarity throughout his NHL career.
“I came into camp feeling really good, health-wise. The injury was obviously disappointing. The second time, I took more than enough time to heal. I came back and there was no issue. Going forward I won’t have to talk about it again. It was a frustrating thing, but the first couple of games I felt like myself again, and that was nice. I only played 30-some games this year. That was disappointing. I like to be there for my teammates.”
The Canadiens forward was asked about the endless stream of injuries and the impact made by the medical staff, but he was quick to defend his colleagues.
“It’s hard to describe the mindset we have. It may not make sense, but we’ve played with so much in the past, dealt with so much, we kinda believe we’ll be able to come through on the other side. But as you get older, it’s not as easy and maybe we have to be smarter It’s one of those things you self-assess, and I’ll learn from it.
“In my case, maybe I wasn’t totally honest with them. They can only deal with so much information. As a player, you have that responsibility. After that, I think it was just a little bit of bad luck. To suffer the same injury twice is pretty unlucky. These guys work incredibly hard, they do a lot of work for us. We’ll never put the blame on them. As players, we have to do what we can do to take care of ourselves to be in the lineup every night.”
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