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If there’s a silver lining to the Boston Bruins failing to make the playoffs for the second year in a row, it’s the time that it will give top-six center
David Krejci to get even a little bit healthier.
The soon-to-be 30-year-old Krejci, who finished the season with 17 goals and 63 points in 72 games played (a seemingly quiet 63-point season), admitted that this offseason will come with hip surgery.
“It’s alright,” began Krejci when asked about his personal health at B’s break-up day on Monday. “I knew this question was going to come up, but I’m going to need surgery on my hip. It’s been bothering me for 20 or so games. But we have a good medical staff here and they got me through games, so I still felt like I was in decent shape to play games and there’s been games where I thought I felt pretty good. So I was able to finish the season and I was even ready to play the playoffs.”
Injuries have been Krejci’s biggest nemesis over the last two seasons, too, with a knee injury limiting Krejci’s 2014-15 year, while this year came with shoulder woes along with this hip ailment.
This injury is something Krejci went through once before, back in 2009, when Krejci finished a highly successful 2008-09 campaign as a shell of himself, with just two goals and eight points in 11 playoff games after a (still) career-best 73 points in 82 games played on Boston’s highly successful second line.
“I’m looking at it kind of two ways: one is that yeah it was kind of a nagging injury from last year, I missed almost half the season and this year I felt maybe the best I felt my first 50 games,” said Krejci, who finished the season with two goals and nine points in the final seven games of the season. “Then I missed some games from my shoulder injury and after I came back it was never the same and the nagging injury kind of kept coming back and it got to the point where we’ve been talking surgery for a while now so it was frustrating. But at the same time I had this surgery about six years ago on my other leg and never felt better after. So at the same time I’m actually looking forward to getting it done next week or two and you know be the player that I can be with nothing holding me back.”
The word that Krejci was injured is far from shocking, you’d say, especially when you noticed Krejci’s struggles when it came to his skating game and getting that jump needed to push pace the other way. The empty-net goal scored by
Rick Nash in Boston’s Mar. 23 loss to the New York Rangers was a prime example of this, as Nash made Krejci look like he was stuck in the mud on the play.
And with surgery slated for the next week or so, Krejci expects to be ready to play for the Czech Republic in the highly anticipated (depending on who you are) World Cup of Hockey this September.
“Last time it was about four months recovery and obviously that was six years ago, so the technology has gotten a little bit better,” said Krejci. “And also the rehab is going to, you know, they have different ways to treat it and do rehab now so I’m hoping it’s going to be a little bit quicker. So we have May, June, July, August… so yeah I’m expecting to be back even for the World Cup.”
This was also Krejci’s first year as Boston’s highest-paid forward -- with a $7.25 million cap-hit -- and touched on the idea of waiving his no-move clause if the Bruins brought the idea to him this summer.
“I really don’t even want to [leave if asked]. I love Boston,” Krejci, who has a full no-move through 2019, noted. “This is my home. So that’s where I would like to be.
“I mean I signed here for a reason, not that I want to go somewhere else. So I signed six years and I want to stay here the six years,” continued Krejci. “So obviously there are some things you can’t control but if you ask me if I want to stay or go, I’m going to stay.”
The Sternberk, Czech Rep. native, drafted by the B’s with the 63rd overall pick in 2004, has spent his entire 623-game NHL career with the Black and Gold, and his 338 career assists rank 13th on the club’s all-time list, while his 472 points are the 18th-most in club history.
Ty Anderson has been covering the National Hockey League for HockeyBuzz.com since 2010, has been a member of the Pro Hockey Writers Association's Boston Chapter since 2013, and can be contacted on Twitter, or emailed at Ty.AndersonHB[at]gmail.com.
Boston Bruins Blogger •Bruins Feature Columnist • 
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