Hard Hawk Hockey

Hossa Injured?

Reports coming out of Chicago today are that newly signed free agent forward, Marion Hossa has a shoulder injury which occured during the playoffs. The severity of the in jury is not known, other than it appears to be a torn rotator cuff, but I have not seen anything confirming that.

The $60 million dollar man is being evaluated by the Blackhawks and he is going through testing as well as therapy to determine everything. If surgery is needed, he could be out until December. Quite a blow if this is the case for sure.

This begs the question of course, how could he have passed a physical before signing? Or did he disclose this and the Hawks knew about it? Alot of questions and concerns here, and of course the talk will be, how could the Hawks sign a player with a shoulder injury to a long term deal, while letting a healthy player who had a great season for them last year leave? Did Dale Tallon and his staff do the homework? And does this injury explain why Hossa was virtually invisible in the playoffs especially the finals?

While I am not a physician, nor claim to know anything about medicine, I read that this type of injury may not show up during a physical. Hmmm, if it’s a rotator cuff, how does that not show up? Was Hossa complaining of pain, or problems? If you are going to sign someone for 12 years, and invest 60 million dollars, I would expect that you fully check out the player in question. Anything less than that is stupid. John McDonough the Hawks president is starting to get an awful lot of crap thrown his way for decisions that he has been involved in lately. I am not sure how much involvment he had in the Hossa signing, but as Tallon’s boss, he needs to be on the list here of people who may or may not have done their homework.

As fans, we need some answers, and don’t sugarcoat things. You won’t be able to sweep this under the rug, like you did with Dale Tallon by making him an advisor, after you fired him. If Hossa is going to miss the first few months of the season, things now change dramatically for the Hawks and any trades that they were thinking of making will have to be reevaluated. This could very well put new GM Stan Bowman at a huge disadvantage. The pressure to have a good start without the use of Hossa is something that the Hawks were not planning for. Kane and Toews, as well as Sharp, Keith and Seabrook will have to show their true leadership and guide this team without Hossa’s help. His potential 40 goals will probably be reduced to 25, and someone else is going to have to step up.
On top of that our “Man From France” Cristobal Huet will need to stand on his head.

Stay tuned as this develops some more. It’s more public relations negativity that the Hawks just don’t need right know.

Thanks for reading