Nick Suzuki will miss games for the first time in his NHL career, and the Montreal Canadiens now have to find a way forward without their captain.
The diagnosis is an upper-body injury. The timeline is ugly, with an expected return no sooner than Nov. 18.
It happened Tuesday night against the Sharks, when Suzuki blocked a shot with his left hand in a 4-3 overtime loss on home ice.
Captains are supposed to pay that price. The bill just rarely arrives this big.
The bench footage is hard to watch: Suzuki folded forward, head down, cradling his left glove while the C on his chest disappeared into the hunch.
And he wasn't coasting through a quiet start. He leads the Canadiens with 12 points through nine games.
He was heating up, too, with five points over his last five outings.
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Martin St-Louis faces 12 games without his top scorer
Count them. Montreal has 12 games on the schedule before his earliest return date, starting with Friday's visit to Chicago.
That's the first stop of a four-game road trip running through Winnipeg, St. Louis and Dallas. Not the stretch you want to open with a hole at the top of the lineup.
The cushion isn't there, either. The Canadiens are 4-3-2 with a -4 goal differential.
And the infirmary was already crowded. Ivan Demidov is on injured reserve until at least Oct. 31, and Samuel Montembeault is out until at least Oct. 25.
Michael Matheson is day-to-day on top of that. For a team still looking for its footing, this is the wrong week for a pileup.
Losing Suzuki is like pulling the center pole out of a tent. The canvas doesn't vanish, but everything starts sagging toward the middle.
So where does Martin St-Louis turn? Kirby Dach, Jake Evans and Alex Newhook have each gone minus-5 so far.
Phillip Danault is still chasing his first goal of the season. He has two assists to show for his work.
The scoring load shifts to Cole Caufield, who leads the team with six goals and has four of them over his last five games.
Juraj Slafkovsky has six points in that same five-game stretch. Lane Hutson has nine points from the blue line.
Nobody on the roster matches Suzuki's +6 rating, though. That kind of two-way value doesn't get replaced by committee.
Throwing Owen Beck or Oliver Kapanen, with two games apiece this season, into top-six minutes to plug the gap would be a mistake. They aren't ready to absorb that kind of load.
Which puts the phone in Kent Hughes' hand. A month without the captain is long enough to expose whether this roster has real depth or just bodies.
And that timeline only says at least. If the Canadiens are hovering around .500 by mid-November, the conversation in Montreal changes fast.
Should Kent Hughes trade for a top-six forward before the captain returns?
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