MONTREAL — Cole Caufield couldn’t have been any clearer: if it was up to him, he would have played last Saturday against the Toronto Maple Leafs and every other game since.
“For sure, if we were in a playoff spot, no doubt in my mind I would still be playing,” Caufield said Friday morning. “It really wasn’t up to me to stop playing.”
And that is a good thing. It is a sign that the Canadiens and Caufield’s agent, Pat Brisson, understand what is important here to a far greater extent than Caufield does himself. Because if there is no doubt in Caufield’s mind that he would be playing if the Canadiens were in a playoff spot, let me say there is a lot of doubt in mine.
If the Canadiens were somehow fighting for the playoffs right now, it is very clear they would still be nowhere near where general manager Kent Hughes has repeatedly stated he wants the Canadiens to be, which is to be in a position to win on a sustainable basis. , to contend for the Stanley Cup and not simply qualify for the playoffs. Hughes has been adamant about it every time he has spoken publicly. He makes sure to mention it every time he speaks because he knows the Canadiens aren’t even close to that right now.
It is difficult to imagine the Canadiens, even while in a playoff spot, allowing Caufield’s shoulder injury to linger and risk causing further damage. Martin St. Louis often talks about how he would like his players to better manage risk and reward on the ice, and this would be a horrible mismanagement of risk and reward off the ice if Caufield were allowed to continue playing.
Caufield would not confirm that he has a torn labrum in his right shoulder, but he did say he will be having the same surgery Josh Anderson had in 2020 — a surgery that happened after Anderson tried playing through the injury for months and produced terrible results — and Anderson’s surgery was for a torn labrum. Caufield will also be operated on by the same doctor as Anderson, Dr. Peter Millett of the Steadman Clinic in Vail, Colorado on Wednesday. Anderson said his shoulder did not feel like it was at full strength until seven months after the surgery, but Caufield is hopeful his timeline will be shorter, and in any case, even if it were to take seven months that would still allow him to be ready before the start of next season.
“I think everybody’s different,” he said. “Younger guy, so hopefully my body can heal a little bit faster. But I think the timing of this is why I’m doing it now, to be ready for next season and be back 100 percent. For sure it will be a long process, but it’s something I’m going to really work hard at and be 100 percent as fast as possible.”
We spoke to another orthopedic surgeon who specializes in shoulder injuries, Dr. Robert Volk of the Centers for Advanced Orthopedics in Bethesda, Maryland, who spent a year as an associate team physician with the Florida Panthers in 2012-13. The picture he painted of the risk/reward scenarios for someone playing through a torn labrum — not Caufield specifically, of course — was not pretty.
“The concern is a lot of research and a lot of literature that we have in the orthopedic community shows that if the player sustains another instability event, another dislocation, then oftentimes that causes more significant damage and can be much harder to fix, or maybe even be permanent,” Dr. Volk said in a phone interview. “So when somebody has this sort of injury, a lot of discussion goes with the player, the agent, the team, the medical team that if we take the player out of the season and repair the shoulder, yeah, we lose the season, but there’s a really high percentage of return to play, somewhere around the 90-95 percent range.
“So there’s some discussion about, do we take the player out of this season and lose this season, but we have him back in time for next season, versus do we let him play and if he sustains another injury maybe we lose two seasons out of it.”
Dr. Volk explained that when a shoulder gets dislocated — not separated, which is more severe and a different thing altogether — there is often a labral tear that comes with it. Caufield said he dislocated his shoulder at least twice, once when he fell in a Dec. 23 game in Dallas and again when he fell in a Jan. 3 games in Nashville. The first time it happened, Caufield said he was able to pop the shoulder back into place and it wasn’t that big of a deal.
We watched every shift Caufield took in that game in Dallas and saw nothing out of the ordinary, aside from maybe this shift very early in the game.
Looks like nothing, but if you watch as Caufield skates away you can see him kind of rotating his right shoulder a bit as he gets up and then drooping over to his right side as he skates behind the net. We can’t be sure this was the fall, but there was nothing else that was evident in the broadcast of the game that night.
Doesn’t get much more innocent than this, and Caufield never even left the ice after the fall as he started the ensuing power play.
“I kind of put it back in myself a couple of seconds later and it wasn’t too bad,” Caufield said. “The second time was in Nashville, the same kind of thing happened. That time it was a little more painful, but our medical staff has done a great job just kind of doing some rehab work on it and kind of making me feel 100 percent in my opinion.”
The fall in Nashville was more obvious. It happens near center ice as Caufield collides with Nashville defenseman Mattias Ekholm and then is clearly laboring as he skates off the ice.
Caufield missed a couple of shifts but was back in the game relatively quickly. Again, the fall didn’t look all that serious. If anything, Caufield’s knee could have been a source of concern more so than the shoulder.
Caufield did have shoulder pain over the summer, but he felt it was unrelated to what is happening now. Brisson told both TVA Sports and BPM Sports that this was something that had been lingering and that Caufield had been experiencing some degree of shoulder pain for upwards of six months.
“Everything’s kind of a different situation,” Caufield said. “I don’t think it was too serious until it happened twice this year in kind of a week or two span. That’s when I was kind of like, let’s deal with that and maybe see what’s actually going on. It wasn’t like I was in pain. The medical staff did a great job working on me right after it happened and getting me back out there as soon as possible. They’ve really helped me out playing those games that I did, getting me back out there, feeling 100 percent.
“We didn’t really know anything until we got the images, the MRIs and stuff (last Friday). For me, it was all just a learning process. It’s obviously tough to see what’s really going on. But just fixing it, I’ll feel a lot more confident in it and I think going forward it’s the best decision.”
A study published last year by the journal Arthroscopy, Sports Medicine, and Rehabilitation looked at labral tears in 29 NHL players between 2004 and 2020 and compared them to a control group of 55 players who did not suffer labral tears. The study found that while the return to play rate is indeed quite high, it can take on average three years for those players to get back to their prior levels of performance and their career longevity was impacted by the surgery.
Dr. Volk, however, says he finds that three-year timeline to be a bit of a stretch.
“I think that sounds a little bit prolonged, but there are a lot of factors at play,” he said. “If the player sustained a simple labrum tear, and I don’t mean to minimize it, but I mean if it’s just a labrum tear and there’s not a bone involvement like a fracture or something like that, then that player has a very high return to play rate, even the next season. But if there’s more, if there’s bone loss or a fracture of some kind, that may make the recovery much more prolonged. But I will say that if he didn’t undergo surgery now and he had repeated dislocations and re-injury, then yes, that can definitely have career implications. There’s no doubt about that.”
Hughes said last Wednesday that, in certain cases, and with certain players, the Canadiens need to do a better job of protecting players from themselves. That was on Jan. 18, or 15 days after Caufield’s second shoulder dislocation, and surely at a time when he was already consulting various specialists for it since he consulted three different doctors on this.
So Hughes was actually being quite literal and current when he said that. And the Canadiens — and Brisson — have done quite well to protect Caufield from himself in this case because it is far more important to have a healthy Caufield next season than having a healthy one right now.
“I already miss it,” Caufield said when asked if he will miss shooting pucks. “I think they took my sticks away in the locker room, and my skates. I’ll miss it for sure, but again, I think it’s what’s best for me long term.
“I’ll make up for those pucks not being shot.”
(Photo of Cole Caufield: Vincent Ethier / Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)
.