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Well, this news didn't come out of nowhere. Both Matt Duchene and Bobby Ryan left the game on Thursday against the Canadiens and did not return. The team was incredibly vague about what the injuries entailed, so nobody knew how bad the prognosis was going to be. Today we learned that they were both placed on the injured reserve:
At least we now know what the specifics of the injury are, and there is a bit of a better timeline. A groin injury for Duchene shouldn't take him out for too long, but we're probably looking at a return some time in January. Consistent groin injuries are not good, but as far as I can tell, he only missed one game in 2013 from a previous groin issue.
As for Ryan, a concussion is certainly not good news. He obviously isn't nearly as important to the Senators offense as Duchene is, but he is still a fixture in the top-nine on the right side that was already weak before he went down. It's always hard to tell how long someone will be out with a concussion, so it could be two weeks or it could be a few months. It looks like this is the first concussion he has had, so that is the one positive. The first time a player gets one will always be the easiest, but moving forward he will be more prone to getting another one. He's had a million injuries since coming to the Senators, but they've essentially all been on his hands or fingers, and surprisingly never a concussion until now.
With Duchene being out for an unspecified amount of time, fans minds will be racing about the possibility of him being out too long so that it would be impossible to trade him before the deadline. With a groin injury, they should be fine. Still though, Ottawa might lose a tiny bit of leverage if a team acquiring him is more worried about his injury for the rest of the season. I still think the right move is to do everything they can to re-sign both him and Mark Stone as long as they are both willing to stay. Duchene's current injury shouldn't change much of anything in that regard.
With these two out of the lineup, here is how the Senators lines looked this morning:
I'm happy to see the Tkachuk-White-Stone line still intact, but the rest of the lines look pretty dreadful.
With Duchene and Ryan out for a while here, I'd love to see two of Rudolfs Balcers, Filip Chlapik, and Logan Brown get called up, because there is no reason why Max McCormick, Tom Pyatt, and Magnus Paajarvi should be getting ice time right now. Getting Pyatt and Paajarvi scratched is wishful thinking with Guy Boucher at the helm but they haven't deserved to play at all. At the very least, Nick Paul needs to be getting 4th line minutes because he seems like he can actually be a fine player on that line, as opposed to the other options for the Senators.
Boucher said he might go with 11 forwards tonight though, so either Paul is out of the lineup or he isn't really playing on much of a line with Pyatt. That's not exactly ideal. The Senators will need their secondary scoring options to step up, and hopefully at some point they will call up one of their better Belleville forwards to help in that regard. Either way, it won't be fun having these two not playing, especially Duchene.
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