The Canucks won their second game in a row Saturday night, defeating the Edmonton Oilers 2-1 in overtime, and while the victory came over Edmonton, it was still something of a surprise. For one thing, the Canucks have only won two in a row twice this season. Plus they had yet to win a single game in 3-on-3 overtime. And they did it all with seven of their regular players out with injury.
It's hard to keep track of all the Canucks' injuries right now. Who's hurt? Who isn't? It's not as simple as looking as who played and who didn't. Henrik Sedin played. He was clearly hurt, and he appeared to be trying to implement an identification system: the injured players are the ones standing at the bench. Sadly, no one else followed his lead, and he wound up ominously standing alone the whole game, like the little guy in this clip:
Anyway. Until everyone else decides to stand, we're going to have to do this the old-fashioned way: an injury report.
Centre Brandon Sutter has been out since November 10, and underwent sports hernia surgery on December 1. He's not expected to return until mid-January.
The Canucks lost Luca Sbisa the same day Sutter went under the knife. The defender's hand injury sounds painful. According to Iain MacIntyre, he still can't hold a stick. Which is crazy, since the ability to hold a stick is what separates man from the animals.
Dan Hamhuis is out with a broken face. The blueliner took a puck to the mug versus the New York Rangers on December 9 and underwent surgery to repair facial fractures. It was the worst kind of injury: the one that spawns the annual round of thinkpieces on face shields. You never want to be the guy who gets that injury.
Chris Tanev has some sort of lower-body injury, and while the Canucks have been as vague on the severity as the general area, we can infer from the recent call-up of Ashton Sautner that the steady defender will be out for a while. So what's the injury? Two guesses. Either it was sustained when Tanev blocked a shot at the end of the Tampa game, then limped off the ice, obviously injured, or, since Tanev looks more and more like Brent Sopel every day, he put his back out picking up a cracker.
Goalie Ryan Miller is out with muscle cramps. The Canucks have been vague on this one, but we can again infer that it's not good, since Miller isn't even backing up Jacob Markstrom on the bench right now. No surprise. Cramps are terrible.
Chris Higgins is expected to return to the lineup after missing Saturday's game with an undisclosed injury. We haven't been informed about what ails Higgins, but if we had to guess, we'd say he was stung by a space hornet. You can't just walk that off.
Alex Burrows missed Saturday's game, but he's listed as probable for Monday. He apparently has a sore neck, probably from looking over his shoulder so often after all the guys he's chirped throughout his career decided this was the season they'd start sharing some of the stuff he said.
