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Healthy Season Overall for Flyers

February 12, 2011, 10:34 AM ET [ Comments]
Tim Panaccio
Philadelphia Flyers Blogger • RSSArchiveCONTACT
Been a lotta talk lately around the Flyers concerning their good health.

Yes, Michael Leighton had his season w/back issues. Yes, Ian Laperriere is out until at least next season with post-concussion syndrome.

Other than that, however, the Flyers have been blessed with just 152 man games lost due to injury.

Chris Pronger missed a total of 13 games this season and the club went 9-4.

When I saw Claude Giroux go down the other night with a blocked shot, I feared the worst. Yet he was fine.

“I got caught out of position and tried to get back in the lane and [the puck] kinda hit me where I had no padding,” Giroux said. “It’s all good. It’s part of hockey.”

He's sore, but he's okay.

Many fans out there have been highly critical of trainer Jim McCrossin in recent years for the all the groin/abdominal/labrum injuries the Flyers have had.

None of those have been issues this year. Some of the players told me that McCrossin changed their in-season routine. They do more "core" training - abs and groin -on off days than weight training.

I even use a scaled-back version of this routine myself which is on a video McCrossin created for every player to use in the off-season. It's helped me, too.

“Not so much in the off-season, but every day between games the team is up in the gym doing 4-5-6 exercises,” Scott Hartnell told me for a piece I did for Sporting News.

“Abdominal and back stuff. Sometimes you see those nagging groin injuries and whatever, but it’s paying off for us now, especially, in the stretch run.”

Now the one guy who benefited most seems to be Danny Briere, who like Simon Gagne, was bothered by groin/abdominal injuries in years past but is healthy this season.

"I did do a lot less running this year because it wasn’t part of our testing," Briere said. "And I didn’t have to worry about it, because running five or six or seven miles isn’t probably gonna help me much when I jump on the ice. So, I hadn’t thought about it before, but maybe that's been helping.”

Don't even ask coach Peter Laviolette about this. He reminds everyone that the year Carolina won the Stanley Cup (2006) they got rocked with major injuries but survived.

He said his record for healthy teams in Carolina "is atrocious."

Here's some stats on Flyer man games lost due to injury since 2000:

2001-02: 213

2002-03: 212

2003-04: 241

2005-06: 388

2006-07: 300

2007-08: 315

2008-09: 330

2009-10: 205

2010-11: 152 so far
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