ARLINGTON, VA — The Washington Capitals announced Thursday that rookie Ryan Leonard will miss the next three to four weeks with a shoulder injury.
Leonard has been out since taking a hit from Anaheim Ducks forward Jacob Trouba on December 5. Head coach Spencer Carbery added Thursday morning that Leonard also injured his face in the collision, but noted that he did not have a concussion.
“He’s got facial injuries,” Carbery said. “I’m not going to go into the specifics of what areas of his face, but he does not have a head injury. Facial, whatever you want to call it, (and) shoulder injury.”
Carbery previously said that Leonard would be out for an “extended period of time” but had declined to offer specifics. The Capitals’ timeline would place Leonard’s return in early to mid-January.
Leonard went down the tunnel early in the first period against the Ducks after a blindside hit from Trouba. He stayed down on the ice in visible pain for around 15 seconds before heading to the locker room with a visibly bloodied nose.
Despite protests from the Capitals both during and after the game about the high hit, Trouba was not penalized for the play and received no supplemental discipline from the NHL.
“We have to do something as a league (about those kinds of hits),” Carbery said on Sunday. “I don’t know where this goes, if anything — it’s just the head contact is the key, right? That’s the key to all of this, is the head contact, and whether he’s low, and he’s in a very, very vulnerable spot.”
Two days after the injury, Leonard was spotted wearing a sling in the Capitals locker room during the team’s postgame celebration.
Carbery told reporters on Thursday that Leonard’s prognosis was worse than he’d hoped for at first, but better than he’d feared, given the nature of the hit.
“I was hoping he was going to come back in that game,” he said. “Now, it was a violent hit. So, when he gets up, and he’s bleeding, you’re definitely concerned. And then him not coming back in the game, then you start to think, ‘Could this be something that’s really long-term?’ Surgery, whatever.
“So, yeah, it didn’t look good. I’m not going to go back into the details of the hit. Didn’t like the hit. But to miss four weeks — I would say I would have loved for him to miss zero weeks. But four weeks, given how violent the hit was, I guess that’s okay.”
Leonard has scored 18 points (7g, 11a) in 29 games played this season.
The injury brought an abrupt end to what had been the hottest streak of Leonard’s young NHL career. Two days earlier, he became the first rookie of the season to record a four-point game with a stellar performance (2g, 2a) against the San Jose Sharks, and he had eight points (2g, 6a) in his last seven games.
That strong stretch of play earned Leonard a spot on the Capitals’ first unit power play, where he found instant success. Washington went 4-for-16 with Leonard on the top unit — scoring all four goals while he was on the ice — and he recorded three assists on the man advantage in that span. He also averaged more than 15 total minutes a night in the 10 games before the injury.
“Our power play was kind of clicking at a bit of a better rate once he got on there,” Dylan Strome told RMNB on Wednesday. “I think he controls the puck really well. I think he seemed to be just finding his stride, and I really felt like the sky was the limit for him. I know he was closing in on that rookie scoring race, so it’s unfortunate to see. Obviously, we’re going to miss him a ton. He’s a great hockey player, really great kid, super down-to-earth, and you just feel for him.”
With Leonard out relatively long-term, Carbery stressed that the rest of the team needs to step up in his absence.
“It’s not an ideal scenario, but could have been worse,” Carbery said of the injury. “Injuries are part of playing in the NHL, so he’ll be back before you know it. And now it’s on us, like I said yesterday, to continue to play to our standard with him out of the lineup, and also opportunities here for some other guys to step into some of those roles, or the roles that he was playing, whether it’s power play or five-on-five, and take advantage of that opportunity.”
