David Reinbacher Sidelined for a Month with Broken Finger

While Thursday night’s finger injury was just bad luck, it broke while he was trying to block a shot. There is no denying at this point that he truly is injury-prone, especially when it comes to his knees.

The truth is, as much as the Habs don’t want to admit it, Reinbacher has bad knees and will likely always be at risk in some way based on how his career has played out so far. During his Draft + 1 season, Reinbacher injured his knee on two occasions. The first time it happened was in October of the 2023-24 season, when playing for Kloten HC, where it was also reported that he may have also had a small fracture to his radial bone in his arm. Reinbacher missed 17 games due to those injuries. Then he injured his MCL when competing at the World Championships for Team Austria, where he missed 3 games due to the injury.

As a result of that injury, he came to Montreal Canadiens Training Camp for the 2024-25 season with a less effective skating stride. This eventually led to him falling back on his knee, causing a partial tear of his ACL. That meant that Reinbacher had 3 knee injuries within a calendar year. It’s no surprise that he had struggled a bit to get back to form. Knee injuries are a killer on a player’s skating. Thankfully, the surgery he got helped his skating stride return to what it was before the injuries that changed him for about a year.

Growing up, Reinbacher had Osgood-Schlatter disease, which caused pain in his knees. He claims he has grown out of it, but I wonder if it somehow made him prone to injuring his knees in the future. It could have a factor, but maybe again it’s just the bad injury luck that Reinbacher has had throughout his career.

It’s clear that Reinbacher’s finger injury was a sign of pure bad luck, but at the end of the day, there is no way that he isn’t also injury prone, much like Kirby Dach, as they both seem to get themselves in situations that leave them vulnerable. However, for Reinbacher, this is a bigger issue as he’s unable to actually develop as a player.

The fact that playing in North America is definitely than playing in Europe, Reinbacher needs time to get used to playing on a smaller ice. The fact that he’s only played 34 AHL games over parts of two seasons so far is not enough for him to be NHL-ready, and therefore, he can’t have any setbacks over the next year if he’s hoping to make it next season. Reinbacher has all the tools you’d want for a shutdown defenseman, but he needs to be healthy to put it all together.

Hopefully, this finger injury is the end of Reinbacher’s bad luck with injuries for a long time, and he can prove all his doubters wrong, but the last few years have been rough. Reinbacher will be turning 21 years old next month, so there is still plenty of time for him to develop into an everyday NHL defenseman. It just means he needs to be healthy when he returns to Laval at the end of October.

What are your thoughts on David Reinbacher’s injury?