Alexey Toropchenko is the latest hockey player to miss time because of a bizarre off-ice injury, after the St. Louis Blues said he is considered week to week after sustaining burns to his legs as part of a home accident. No other details were provided.
“I just know it was a home accident, so we’re going to leave it at that,” coach Jim Montgomery told reporters after the team's morning skate Monday.
Toropchenko is the third NHL player this season to get injured away from the rink, joining a dubious list of maladies over the past decade or so.
New Jersey Devils leading scorer Jack Hughes had surgery on Nov. 15 to repair a finger injury from a freak accident at dinner at a steakhouse in Chicago two nights earlier. Hughes was expected to miss roughly two months.
The team declined to reveal which finger or fingers were affected, other than to say Hughes underwent an operation at the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York. A photo posted on social media of Hughes dining in the city with pop star Tate McRae showed his right hand bandaged.
Hughes, the top pick in the 2019 draft who is expected to be on the U.S. Olympic team in February in Milan, missed the end of last season and the playoffs after shoulder surgery. That was a hockey injury, as Hughes went right shoulder first into the boards after getting tangled up with Vegas' Jack Eichel during a game in early March.
The two-time defending Stanley Cup champion Florida Panthers are bidding for a threepeat and going through a stretch without Eetu Luostarinen after coach Paul Maurice said the Finnish center was out because of "a barbequing mishap.”
Luostarinen was listed as week to week after Maurice announced the injury on Nov. 19. The team did not seem to have a concrete timeline for when Luostarinen might be ready to return.
In between the time the NHL paused its season because of the pandemic in March 2020 and resumed to hold the playoffs in quarantined bubbles that summer, the Washington Capitals lost the services of goaltender Ilya Samsonov.
According to reports in Russia, Samsonov fell off an all-terrain vehicle in Magnitogorsk and injured his neck and back. He played two more seasons with the Capitals before bouncing around to Toronto and Vegas and landing back home in the KHL for this season.
The Boston Bruins' long 2019 playoff run had plenty of drama even before captain Zdeno Chara broke his jaw in the Stanley Cup Final against St. Louis. Winger David Pastrnak injured his left thumb in a fall while walking to his transportation after a sponsorship dinner in February, the team said.
Pastrnak had a tendon procedure and missed more than a month. Only Tampa Bay's Steven Stamkos had more points than Pastrnak's 15 from the time he returned until the end of the season and recently scored his 400th career regular-season goal.
Veteran forward Dustin Penner missed a Los Angeles Kings game in January 2012 after throwing his back out while eating pancakes his wife made that morning. Penner called it an isolated incident and hoped it would not become chronic.
“Woke up fine, sat down to eat and it locked right up,” Penner told the Kings website at the time. “It never happened to me before. I couldn’t stand up.”
Penner practiced the next day, got back in the lineup for the next game and only missed five the rest of the season. He had 11 points on the Kings' run to their first Stanley Cup championship in franchise history.
AP NHL: https://apnews.com/hub/nhl
Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.
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