One year after brutal injury, Steven Stamkos says he 'may never' be quite the same
He still feels it a year later. He might feel it forever. Though Steven Stamkos is scoring again for the Tampa Bay Lightning, a rod and a screw remain in the right leg he snapped against a goal post 365 days ago. Sometimes it’s stiff. Sometimes it’s tender in spots. Almost every day it’s something – something not quite right.
“Is it ever going to feel the same way it did before?” Stamkos said. “It may never. I’m hoping one day it’s, you wake up and there’s no little pain and there’s no discomfort. It just feels like a regular leg. But I don’t know if that’s going to happen.
“You kind of …
“Your body has a new norm now, and that’s been an adjustment.”
Stamkos has 10 goals, one off the NHL lead. He has 16 points in 15 games. Tampa Bay has 23 points, tied for the league lead. Yet Stamkos is still recovering and hasn’t been happy with his performance. The Lightning is on a six-game winning streak and has gone 11-3-1 without him at his best.
“Best” is relative. Stamkos isn’t back to where he was before the injury because he set such a high standard and the injury was so brutal.
A year ago, Stamkos was playing the best hockey of his career – a career in which he had been drafted first overall and won two goal-scoring titles already at age 23. Not only was he tied for the league lead in goals (14) and points (23), he was playing well defensively. The Lightning was 12-4-0, atop the Eastern Conference. The Sochi Olympics were coming up.
It was going to be a great season until a backcheck in Boston on Nov. 11, 2013. Stamkos tangled with a Bruin, lost his footing and slid into a goal post so hard that the net flew off its moorings. He struggled to his feet but couldn’t put weight on his right leg. He collapsed onto his stomach, buried his head in his hands and pounded the ice with his right fist.
“I’m a rookie coach in the league, and we got off to a good start,” said Lightning coach Jon Cooper. “You’re trying to learn the NHL and find your way, and your best player goes down – not for a tweak of a …”
Cooper didn’t finish the sentence. It was almost like he couldn’t say it.
It was a broken tibia.
“It was for a long time,” Cooper said. “You think about that and all the things you prepared for when you get your shot in the NHL, and there was probably something in my head, ‘Oh, this isn’t going to work out too well.’ ”
The Lightning left Boston for Montreal – and left Stamkos behind.
“It was pretty quiet,” said center Tyler Johnson. “No one was really saying anything, because you didn’t really know what to say.”
Stamkos had surgery the next day. He ended up missing 46 games – plus the Olympics, as hard as he tried to return in time for Team Canada. The Lightning survived without him, going 22-19-5. The silver lining: Cooper had wanted the team to improve defensively; now it had to. The Bolts had wanted to develop young players; now they had to rely on them.
While Stamkos lost his shot at the Hart Trophy (MVP), Art Ross Trophy (scoring champion) and Rocket Richard Trophy (goal-scoring champ), Cooper was a finalist for the Jack Adams Award (coach of the year), Ben Bishop for the Vezina Trophy (best goaltender), Johnson and Ondrej Palat for the Calder Trophy (rookie of the year).
The Lightning is a better team today – and a deeper team, too, after off-season acquisitions by general manager Steve Yzerman. Cooper said when stud defenseman Victor Hedman went down with an injury, the Bolts felt they had been through this kind of thing before.
“Because Stammer couldn’t play, did guys have to accelerate their development?” Cooper said. “For sure. I think the guys got to play a lot more situations than they probably would have been able to beforehand.”
Stamkos returned March 6 – the day after the Lightning traded Martin St-Louis. He had to hop into action in the stretch run, while losing an elite scorer on his wing and a good friend. Oh, and he had to take over the captaincy from St-Louis, too. It was a struggle, not that you would know it from the statistics. He had 11 goals and 17 points in the final 20 regular-season games, then two goals and four points in four playoff games.
“It wasn’t close to being 100 percent when I came back,” Stamkos said. “It was healthy enough for me to play, but it’s tough to come back from something like that. The mind’s a powerful thing.”
At first, Stamkos didn’t have his usual explosiveness in his first three strides. He coasted in the defensive zone instead of stopping hard, and he had a hard time going to the hard areas – around the net, near the boards. The leg felt weak and sore. He didn’t trust it.
Over time, he improved. But it wasn’t until Game 4 of the Lightning’s first-round series with the Canadiens, the last game of the season, that Cooper thought, “OK, he’s fully coming back.”
The thought was that Stamkos just needed a full summer of training.
“That was the big thing, just gaining that muscle back,” Stamkos said. “It’s so hard to get but goes so fast.”
But Stamkos had to modify some things. The surgeon inserted a rod and two screws. One of the screws bugged Stamkos all summer. He and his doctors debated whether to take it out, and eventually they decided to take it out about four weeks before training camp. (The rod is supposed to be permanent.)
Stamkos said the leg feels far better now. Cooper called Stamkos “a completely different player today” than he was at the end of last season. He makes instinctive plays he wouldn’t have made in March or April. He trusts the leg again.
“There’s really no restrictions anymore,” Stamkos said. “That’s mentally and physically. It’s nice to go out and play and react and do the things that make you successful.”
That doesn’t mean he feels he’s playing up to his capability. He said he had found ways to pick up points but didn’t always feel he deserved them. In fairness, he is still adjusting to life without St-Louis, and his linemates have shuffled often because of injuries.
His two-goal performance Sunday in Detroit was encouraging. He fired a rocket on a power play. He stopped short on a 2-on-1 rush, let the defenders rush past and beat the goalie. The play was such a blur, the officials didn’t see the puck go in with the naked eye. Everyone had to wait for a whistle and a replay.
“I think he slowly is getting back,” Bishop said. “You can tell it’s going to take a little bit of time. I don’t know how many games he’s played since he’s come back from that injury, but probably not nearly enough to feel 100-percent comfortable. The scary thing is, he’s only going to get better.”
“I would give him this whole year as a year to recuperate,” Cooper said, “and then see where he’s at a year from now.”
Stamkos said he doesn’t think much about that moment in Boston, even though he has seen the clip of it “a million times,” even though his leg reminds him about it every day. He didn’t need to be told the anniversary was coming. Tuesday night. Chicago.
“We’re at that year mark next game,” Stamkos said. “It’s going to be nice to play that one and just get past it.”
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