RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) — Carolina Hurricanes players Jalen Chatfield, Sean Walker and Seth Jarvis said Friday they don't plan to have surgery for injuries after the team's playoff run to the Eastern Conference final.
Chatfield missed Carolina's last six games with what the defenseman described as a hip injury, while fellow blue-liner Walker was dealing with an aggravation of a shoulder injury. As for Jarvis, the team's leader in regular-season goals and postseason points, the forward said he plans to work on strengthening and rehabbing a lingering right-shoulder issue for the second straight offseason.
Carolina is the only NHL team with an active streak of winning at least one postseason series for seven straight years, with this year's five-game loss to the reigning Stanley Cup champion Florida Panthers marking a third trip to the Eastern final in that span.
Chatfield had missed the closeout game of the second-round series against Washington and then the entire Florida series. The team had never specified the nature of Chatfield's injury, which became a common question for coach Rod Brind'Amour, and he said he should be fine with extra rehab time.
“Just something in the hip,” Chatfield said during Friday's end-of-year player interviews. "It's hard when you get that, trying to skate through that. I just couldn't even get to that speed where I would even be capable of even helping the team on the ice.
“I was able to get back on the ice before the last game and hopefully it was going to be another game or two before I could return. I was super close, for sure.”
Chatfield typically held a second-pairing spot with Dmitry Orlov before his absence, and he scored Carolina's first postseason goal just 2:24 into the opener against New Jersey. Brind'Amour at one point called Chatfield “day to day” in the most optimistic update during his absence.
“Making it as far as we did and being able to play against Florida, it was tough watching," Chatfield said.
The impact of Chatfield's absence compounded when Walker missed the last three games of the Florida series, his last appearance coming in Game 2 after taking a jarring open-ice hit from A.J. Greer and eventually exiting early. At that point, Carolina was down two of its top six defensemen and playing rookies Alexander Nikishin and Scott Morrow with its season on the brink.
Walker said he had suffered a minor shoulder injury late in the regular season that was improving through the postseason before the Greer hit “set me back pretty significantly.” He said he was hoping to return if Carolina advanced to the Stanley Cup Final, but didn't need surgery.
Then there's Jarvis, who led Carolina with 10 assists and 16 points in 15 playoff games after tallying a team-best 32 goals in 73 regular-season games. Surgery had been a possibility last year, though he has focused on rehab and strengthening his shoulder.
“We loved where it was at the start of the season, in terms of the health of it and the strength and everything,” Jarvis said. “Early on it kind of started to slip a little bit, and then kind of re-tore all the work we did on it and all the strength and everything we did. So just dealing with it again wasn't too bad, kind of the same thing as last year.”
Jarvis described the injury as creating more of an issue of pain tolerance than inhibiting on-ice activity — “I mean, the only difference would be I'd probably be able to throw a real nice spiral,” Jarvis said of surgery — while the protective brace he returned to during the season might prevent him from reaching up to catch a puck, for example.
He played all 15 of Carolina's postseason games, scoring the tying goal in the third period of Game 5 against Florida in what turned out to be the Hurricanes' last of the season.
Jarvis said aspirations of potentially playing at the 2026 Olympics were also “a little bit” of a factor in not having surgery, calling the Milan-Cortina Games “definitely a big goal of mine.” The 23-year-old helped Canada win the first 4 Nations Face-Off in February.
“This summer, we were dancing around the idea of what to do with it,” Jarvis said. “The season's gone pretty late, I don't want to miss a lot of time. So I'm going to go with the same protocol as last summer of strengthen it, rehab it. Hopefully maybe wear the brace from the very beginning of the year, and then go from there.”
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AP NHL playoffs: https://apnews.com/hub/stanley-cup and https://apnews.com/hub/nhl
Aaron Beard, The Associated Press
