In Game 3 of the Stanley Cup Finals, cartilage in his ribs was torn by an awkward hit, and this produced an intense stabbing pain in his abdomen. It hurt to skate, to twist, to turn. To do anything with his core sent waves of pain reverberating throughout his body. He kept moving forward, pushing beyond the wall of his own pain tolerance, because it was the playoffs. Then in Game 4 he broke a rib and had a hard time breathing. But with the emotions of an entire city on his back, the first responders and heroes of the Boston Marathon bombings in attendance, waving
their flags in the crowd, singing the rousing national anthem, Bergeron rallied through his building pain.
In Game 5 he took a solid hit that buckled him over in pain, and he nearly went down for the count. But, of course, he played on. At this point the Bruins’ medical staff were worried about his spleen and removed him from the game. He kept telling the trainers that he could play through it, but they sent him to the hospital anyway.
The Bruins were down three games to two to the Blackhawks, and the Cup was on the line. Game 6 approached, and everyone was looking to see what Bergeron would do; he felt the desperate need to play. So he saw a specialist, who said the only way he could play was to have a nerve-blocking injection around the area of the cracked rib. He got one that day, and then another on the day of the game. Not feeling quite right during warm-ups, he received another shot. Game 6 started and Bergeron separated his shoulder in the first period, adding to the misery.
By the third period he could barely breathe. The Bruins eventually ended up los- ing Game 6 and the Cup. After the crushing loss to the Chicago Blackhawks, Berg- eron, full of disappointment, headed to Massachusetts General Hospital. A day later it was revealed that in addition to the massive cut on his nose, torn cartilage in his abdomen, broken rib, and separated shoulder, Bergeron was also playing with a collapsed lung.
He was playing hockey—in the Stanley Cup Finals—with a collapsed lung.
Even after enduring all of that, Bergeron still remarkably finished the playoffs with 15 points in 22 games. He was such a physical wreck after the postseason ended that during the summer when he got married, he could only honeymoon at his in-laws’ cottage in Quebec because he had to undergo such extensive rehab.
Even given all that, in that same season, during those same exact playoffs, on that same exact Boston Bruins team, in that same shattered city, Bergeron’s team- mate Gregory Campbell nearly trumped him in the pain department. It was during the grudge match versus the Pittsburgh Penguins, and Campbell, a hard-nosed, workingman’s player, was guarding the point on a Bruins penalty kill. Penguins for- ward Evgeni Malkin, one of the hardest-shooting players in the league, ripped a screaming shot from the point. Campbell flung his entire body onto the ice in an attempt to block the shot. The slap shot hit Campbell right in the leg and broke it instantly. But hockey doesn’t stop just because a bone breaks, and the game con- tinued.
The Penguins buzzed around the offensive zone trying to set up another scoring opportunity, and Campbell was left stranded out there for more than forty grueling seconds, trying to compete on his broken leg. Grimacing in sheer agony, he used his stick as a crutch and staggered to his skates. He dropped a single glove to the ice almost as a white flag. He couldn’t skate and could only move one leg. So he just pivoted in one spot on his one good leg, turning this way and that, trying to poke his stick out for a deflection. The puck mercifully cleared the zone, and Campbell scooted over to the Bruins bench, where he collapsed into the arms of the training staff.
On the other side of the ice during those same exact 2013 Cup finals, the Chica- go Blackhawks were equally battered. While Bergeron and Campbell soldiered through their injuries, several of the Blackhawks were playing through their own playoff misery. Bryan Bickell, a rough-hewn NHL power forward, was playing through a grade-two knee sprain that usually required four weeks of rehabilitation, and at times he could barely pick himself off the ice. In a memorable hit in the Western Conference Semifinals, Bickell was absolutely lit up, taken right off his skates in the corner by Red Wings defenseman Jonathan Ericsson, no small feat considering Bickell is 6'4" and 250 pounds. When he stood up, his leg gave out and he wobbled backward, falling down to the ice like a drunken sailor. He gath- ered himself and tried to stand up again, only to have the leg give out a second time; he wobbled some more and fell straight back down onto all fours. But he played on and fought through the playoffs and the Red Wings and the Los Angeles Kings, because he knew his ultimate role in the Cup finals was to take on Zdeno Chara, the Bruins’ 6'9" Loch Ness monster of a defenseman. He did that honor- ably, too, taking on the Big Z with only one leg. Bickell ended up scoring 17 points in 23 playoff games, including multiple game-winning goals.
Not to be outdone, Bickell’s teammate Michal Handzus, the oldest player in the Chicago lineup, played in the finals with a broken wrist and a torn MCL. That fact is ridiculous in and of itself—that a man could steel himself to play professional ice hockey at the highest level in the most intense game with only one arm and one leg at full strength—but it becomes profoundly absurd when you realize that not only did he play but he scored on a shorthanded breakaway in the finals.
While Gregory Campbell holds the ill-gotten trophy for the single most heroic moment in the 2013 finals, Chicago’s Andrew Shaw earned the award for the ugli- est. During the Cup-winning Game 6, Shaw, who is affectionately nicknamed “the Mutt,” had his own pass intercepted by surly Bruins forward Shawn Thornton, a 6'2" bridge abutment on skates, with a heavy shot. Thornton stole the puck from Shaw, skated over the offensive blue line, and immediately let fly a hard snap shot that Shaw, in an attempt to win back the puck, received full force in the cheek from about two feet away.
The shot hit Shaw so hard from so close that it sent Shaw’s whole body into a spiral, twisting him completely around before dropping him to the ice in a black- out. Shaw’s stick and one of his gloves flung out and skittered across the ice. He lay motionless on the ice for a few minutes with the Boston fans soundly booing him because, well, it was playoff hockey. Shaw returned the next period with two cuts on his grotesquely swollen right cheek that continuously dripped blood down his face, dressing him in the official war paint of the postseason.
No player in the playoffs is immune to playing in pain. It’s a rite not just re- served for defensive centers like Bergeron or third-line grinders like Shaw. All play- ers feel that thread of playoff history tugging deep inside of them, and whether or not they heed it is up to them. From the bottom man on the roster to the captain, if you are in the playoffs, that thread is in there.
It’s in a player like Duncan Keith, one of the best defensemen in the world, who has won two gold medals for Team Canada and three Stanley Cups for the Chicago Blackhawks. Keith returned to a decisive playoff game immediately after losing seven teeth in one clean shot. Actually, when he lost those seven teeth, he never actually went down, either. He never wavered, never dropped to a knee. Heck, he never even bent over. The opposing team even capitalized on the injury: when the puck hit his face, it took a great bounce that led to a goal. Keith skated off the ice, went in for repairs, and came back out several minutes later and played. He ended up playing over 29 minutes during the game and assisted on the game-tying goal.
“It’s just missing teeth,” said Keith after the game. “It’s a long way from the heart.” He didn’t die, so he played on.
The unbreakable playoff hockey strength is seen in Rick Tocchet, a hard- charging player who refused to fold physically and mentally. He survived multiple season-ending injuries and fought through them all in his quest to win the Cup. One of his worst injuries was in Pittsburgh, when he was skating on a line with the immortal Mario Lemieux.
“Mario went to dump the puck in and shot the puck,” says Tocchet. “It hit me right in the jaw. If there’s a guy you want to get hit by, it would be Mario. I didn’t mind a broken jaw from him. He got me forty goals with tap-ins!”
Tocchet played through it. He finished the game and even scored the game win- ner. Then he took four days off. But Tocchet wasn’t going out for good. Days after the injury he had a tense meeting with Pittsburgh general manager Craig Patrick.
“They were going to wire my mouth shut. It was going to take three to four weeks,” says Tocchet. “I looked at Patrick, and he looked at me. I told him I wasn’t going to take a month off. The playoffs were coming. He was leaning toward hav- ing me not play for a while. I said that I didn’t get traded to Pittsburgh to not win the Cup.”
So Tocchet had a protective bar added to his helmet that made him look like a cyborg Abe Lincoln. Days after breaking his jaw, and sporting the new protective bar, Tocchet got into a fight with the Islanders’ Kris King in the last game of the season. In round one, Game 1 of the Stanley Cup playoffs versus the Washington Capitals, he fought towering and nasty defenseman Kevin Hatcher. While the fight rallied his team, it incensed head coach Scotty Bowman, because of Tocchet’s disregard for his own injury. The Penguins won the Cup, and Tocchet chipped in 19 points in 14 games.
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