Mike Harrington: Kevyn Adams knows Sabres need full study of their injury woes

Just another typical day on the medical front in a season where injuries combined with Covid-19 updates have been a daily talking point.

Don Granato is not a big fan of giving all these medical updates – "what's the opposite of big fan?" he joked when I prefaced an injury question – but there have been so many guys dealing with so many ailments, he has to start some of his daily media briefings simply going down the list of updates.

Granato would much rather be coaching. So, general manager Kevyn Adams has taken to giving reporters some of the more dire nuggets of news this season, in line with what many GMs around the league have done in recent years.

According to ManGamesLost.com, the Sabres have dropped an NHL-high 23.3 points this season due to injured players and health protocols. And their 338 man games lost to injury are second only to Montreal's 412.

Even if you take away the 30 games lost by Jack Eichel (10 prior to his trade to Vegas) and Alex Tuch (20 after the trade) and put the Sabres at 308, they would still be No. 5.

There are lots of questions about the organization's strength and conditioning program and, ultimately, about its medical staff. There are injuries big and small, players who take a long time to rehab and return or get reinjured.

It's not a good look. And it needs a hard look.

Adams admitted he has been thinking a lot about the Sabres' health issues, both this season and last. You can make the case that inexperienced, inferior teams often deal with injuries more. But the volume of what the Sabres have dealt with is definitely eye-opening.

"To me, you really have to take the emotion out of it," Adams told The Buffalo News after practice Tuesday. "You have to say, 'OK, what exactly is going on? Where have the injuries occurred? How have they occurred?' Are there answers to these questions that we could have said, 'It could be preventable if certain things were done.'? Those are the type of questions that I ask, and I've been thinking in my head."

At this point, Adams – and by extension, owners Terry and Kim Pegula – have no choice but to demand an organizational summit on the issue.

The owners are left paying players who can't stay on the ice, and the GM has a team that's one point out of the bottom three of the overall standing. This team has played better than that and has more talent than that. The injuries – both the unavoidable freak ones like we've seen to Craig Anderson and Malcolm Subban, and things like the season-long Mittelstadt mystery – have conspired to ruin yet another campaign.

"It is an important conversation to be having in the organization and getting everybody involved," Adams said. "In my role specifically, you're asking to talk to the doctors, to talk to our medical staff, strength and conditioning stuff, all the sports performance. That even rolls into the practices we're doing, the role of the coaching staff. It's all part of the conversation. It's what I've been thinking a lot about lately, getting that type of discussion going."

You've heard lots of murmuring over recent years about injury treatment here, notably involving players like Robin Lehner and Zach Bogosian. Linus Ullmark and Carter Hutton struggled to stay healthy, as well. And back to May, Jack Eichel revealed nagging injuries he was dealing with here since the 2018-19 season.

In this view, Eichel isn't a part of the discussion for this season. Remember that after a failed attempt at rest and rehab, the team did in fact recommend neck surgery in the spring. The issue, of course, was the type of surgery. The team's medical staff, like many other NHL teams, was not comfortable with an artificial disc replacement and Eichel was traded to Vegas, a team that was. It remains to be seen how that will turn out.

Of much bigger concern should be the situation involving Mittelstadt, who was the No. 1 center coming out of an excellent training camp and has played in parts of just seven games, scoring one measly goal. 

He played 9:07 of the season opener before he suffered an upper-body injury and didn't play again until December. He played three games, collecting one goal and a minus-6 rating, before he realized he still wasn't right and had surgery, missing more than a month. Mittelstadt came back Jan. 25 in Ottawa and played two games with no issues before leaving after playing just 4:59 of the first period Jan. 30 in Colorado.

It's believed Mittelstadt has a core muscle/hernia-type injury that is causing the issues. He initially declined surgery, but then had to give in to his body's messages. After a recheck with doctors, this latest problem was simply a fluid buildup, and Mittelstadt has returned to skating and should be at practice with the team Wednesday.

"I was nervous," Granato admitted. "The player is the only one who knows how to play at the NHL at that pace and what he has to do. ... As you get to know the players, you get to know the personalities, and there's always that window of every guy coming off an injury. They have to go see if they can play at that pace."

"I've been there as an athlete, and what you don't have yet is that chaos of the game," Adams said. "It's 35 seconds into a shift, battling for a puck. In rehab, everything's controlled. In a game, you're going this way and 'boom,' you got to go that way. It's the chaos of it."

Young and old, from 40-year-old Anderson to 20-year-old Jack Quinn, the Sabres have been a M.A.S.H unit all season. Fans are frustrated. So are players and coaches. The GM is too.

"Being frustrated is probably just a natural reaction," Adams said. "But you have to step out of that. I'm going back to the beginning of my time here, the beginning of last season. You just say, 'OK, we need to really take a deep dive into this and look at everything.' And we definitely will."