The damage has been done to Ryan Callahan, who will be sidelined from 6-8 weeks because of a non-displaced fracture of the left hand he suffered blocking Kris Letang’s shot 4:42 into the Rangers’ 4-1 victory at Pittsburgh on Wednesday night.
And to hear the way coach John Tortorella put it, injuries such as Callahan’s just might come with the territory. That’s because his team grinds to the utmost night after night after night to the point where the Rangers entered Thursday night’s Garden match against the Coyotes leading the NHL in hits while running second to the Flyers in blocked shots.
“I think we do things the right way, which sometimes means doing things other teams might not like to do, and that’s blocking shots,” Tortorella said.
He has lost Callahan (no surgery required), Chris Drury (for 31 of the first 32 games this year) and Brandon Dubinsky (for 12 games in the first half of last season) with broken bones in the hand from blocking shots.
“I show tapes of other teams when we’re doing power play and penalty killing preparation and you can see that they block shots but don’t really want to,” Tortorella said. “It’s a mindset we have, where we get big and not small.
“There’s a risk/reward that comes with that, but I think it’s a huge part of our game that we have to have in order to compete. It’s a huge part of our culture. We’re not going to change.”
Asked it the gloves his players wear are a part of the problem rather than any type of solution to prevent injuries, Tortorella said general manager Glen Sather previously has been in touch with the league concerning the safety factor of equipment used in the NHL.
“Skates, [glove] cuffs; there has to be something better,” Tortorella said. “I haven’t really talked to Glen about this [since Callahan’s injury], but I can imagine how he feels.
“There’s something to it.”
There’s something as well to the observation that the Rangers are likely to pay the price for their aggressive nature. They are not a particularly big team, though they try to play as if it is. There are times when the mind and spirit will be willing, but the body simply won’t be able to hold up its end of the bargain.
“We play a hard game, and we’ve had discussions about that,” Tortorella said. “[For that reason] I use four lines more than I ever have before as a coach and I need to be better at that.”
With Drury down for all but a part of the Oct. 15 home opener before returning to the lineup on Wednesday, the Rangers essentially have gone with one extra forward throughout, rotating between Todd White and Derek Boogaard (shoulder injury) as the healthy scratch.
Tortorella said he would like to have a deeper roster via recalls from the AHL Whale, but “only if we have people who are ready and I can tell you we don’t.
“We’re hoping, but I don’t think we’ll have a recall.”
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Tortorella said he expects to have Vinny Prospal, out all year with a right knee injury, back around the middle of January but not sooner. Boogaard is day-to-day, but the coach expressed concern over his conditioning because No. 94 hasn’t skated in a week.