Hurricanes Star Played Through Shoulder Injury

Carolina Hurricanes forward Seth Jarvis just completed the best season of his young career, scoring 67 points in 73 regular season games and 16 in 15 playoff games.

What makes it all the more impressive, and perhaps all the more concerning, is that he wasn't fully healthy at virtually any point.

At the Hurricanes' locker room clean-out on Friday, Jarvis shared that he's been battling a shoulder injury for more than a year now. While he was fine initially, he suffered a setback early in the season and never fully recovered.

"We loved where it was at the start of the season, in terms of the health of it and the strength and everything," Jarvis told reporters. "Early on it kind of started to slip a little bit, and then kind of retore all the work we did on it and all the strength and everything we did. So just dealing with it again wasn't too bad, kind of the same thing as last year."

Despite that, Jarvis, 23, doesn't plan to get surgery this summer, though he knows he will probably have to at some point.

"I mean, the only difference would be I'd probably be able to throw a real nice spiral," Jarvis said.

"This summer, we were dancing around the idea of what to do with it. The season's gone pretty late, I don't want to miss a lot of time. So I'm going to go with the same protocol as last summer of strengthen it, rehab it. Hopefully maybe wear the brace from the very beginning of the year and then go from there."

Again, Jarvis managed to excel even with the injury. He led the team with 32 goals in the regular season and scored the tying goal in Game 5 of the Eastern Conference Final against the Florida Panthers, which proved to be the last goal of the Hurricanes' season.

When healthy, Jarvis believes he can still hit another gear.

"There are still definitely levels I want to get in that department, but I think just figuring out how to score in this league is one of the biggest challenges," Jarvis said. "The league’s always changing and goalies are getting better, so it's always a work in progress, but I think figuring out different ways to score, scoring from different areas and just overall expanding my game offensively that way has been something that I’ve put a lot of focus into. I’m glad I’m starting to see the benefits of it.”