The end of every NHL playoff run is always followed by a sudden revelation on the injury front. It's become something of a tradition for the league, almost like playoff beards or Doc Emeric's dizzying verbosity.
The general hockey viewing public are all-at-once made aware of torn tendons and strained muscles and broken bones and players who just didn't look quite right during the end of the postseason suddenly have a reason why.
For the Tampa Bay Lightning, runners-up for the 2015 edition of the Stanley Cup, the pain of falling two wins short of ultimate victory is probably only matched by the pain of the injuries suffered along the long and winding road to the Stanley Cup finals.
Two top players for the Bolts, starting netminder Ben Bishop and diminutive but electrifying forward Tyler Johnson, revealed Tuesday the extent to which their respective, and formerly unannounced, injuries hindered them.
"Goaltender Ben Bishop sustained a groin tear in Game 2 and center Tyler Johnson - who came into the Stanley Cup Final as the playoff's leading scorer - played through the series with a broken wrist," The Tampa Tribune revealed.
It was well-known that Bishop had suffered some type of unidentified lower-body injury during Game 2, but a groin tear, especially for a goalie of his size and playing style, is mind-boggling. There's no doubting that he looked off and was struggling at times after ceding the net to Tampa rookie Andrei Vasilevskiy for Game 4, but it likely mattered little as the Bolts struggled to put points on the board, culminating in a series-clinching shutout loss in Game 6.
"I couldn't move," Bishop said Monday. "It was one of those things where if I went out there, I could have torn it completely and I would have been done for the series."
Part of the reason for that lack of offensive output for the formerly formidable Lightning was apparently the broken wrist which ailed Johnson. Johnson, 24, entered the series against Chicago with a playoff-leading 21 points, but managed just one goal and on assist throughout the finals. Much like Bishop, he never looked quite right throughout a frustrating, Cup-losing series.
"I think anybody will tell you that you want to make a run like we made, the run Chicago made, you have to stay healthy," said Lightning coach Jon Cooper. "That is the key. The margin of teams is so close. It's the healthy ones that seem to advance.
"I think we stayed somewhat healthy. Then down the stretch things started not going our way in that department. But we'll be the last team ever to say that's an excuse why we lost."
