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Daily News Online Extra: Flyers can’t let injuries be a crutch

Both Jeff Carter and Simon Gagne will miss Game 5 against the Devils. (Yong Kim / Staff Photographer)
Both Jeff Carter and Simon Gagne will miss Game 5 against the Devils. (Yong Kim / Staff Photographer)Read more

During the Flyers' playoff run, Daily News columnist Rich Hofmann will provide a daily column only for philly.com readers. The column will be posted at midday on philly.com. Here is today's edition:

True hockey fans will be able to answer this question immediately. People who intensely follow the playoffs in this sport, who have learned all of the traditions and the folkways over years of observation, will not have to think twice.

Question: What do Marie Antoinette, the Venus de Milo, and losers in the game of Russian Roulette have in common?

Answer: All of them suffered upper body injuries.

It is that time of year in the National Hockey League, where you can read the quiet concern in a general manager's eyes when he comes out before a group of cameras and tape recorders to offer an injury update, when he comes out and moves his lips but really says nothing in order to buy some time. It is the middle of a playoff series and something bad has happened and he doesn't want to tell the other team so that it can plan accordingly.

So he comes out, as Flyers general manager Paul Holmgren did late on Tuesday night, and says, "Simon (Gagne) has a lower body injury. He's day to day."

He says the same thing a second time for a late-arriving camera crew. An attempt is made to draw him out but it is rebuffed with ease. All the league requires about injuries is an acknowledgement that they occurred and whether or not they are on the upper half of the body or the lower half. This convention came into place in the 1990s because teams used to just flat-out lie about what part of what player was hurt. Michael Farber, the Sports Illustrated hockey writer, might have been the first to employ the "diagonal method" of deciphering team injury reports during the playoffs. That is, if the team said it was a right shoulder injury, it was really probably a left knee.

Why all of the mystery? Simple: because playoff hockey is a very primal bit of business, and opponents will target vulnerable body parts. It is just one of the many things the league doesn't tell you in the promotional commercials.

Anyway, Tuesday night, Holmgren would not budge. Holmgren had done this before and long-ago mastered the art of obfuscation. Then he and his worried look left the room as quickly as he entered it.

As it turns out, Holmgren had a lot more on his mind than we knew. Yes, Simon Gagne left the game in the middle of the second period after blocking a shot with his foot. That was bad enough. But what the Daily News reported later in the evening, and what the Flyers confirmed Wednesday morning, was that Jeff Carter also was injured. Coming off a broken foot, Carter took a slap shot to his skate and played only briefly in the last half of the third period. After the game, Carter said it was nothing, that the puck hit him in the shin. But now the club has announced that both Gagne and Carter will miss Thursday's Game 5 of the Flyers' playoff series with the Devils because of foot injuries, a series that had been going so eerily well.

This is a major, major blow and there is no sense pretending that it isn't. A team cannot possibly pull players of the caliber of Gagne and Carter out of the lineup, disrupting both of its top two forward lines, without feeling the effect.

They will have a day to sort things out, but the truth is the truth: up 3 games to 1 in the series, the cliché is that the fourth win is the hardest – and now this fourth win is going to be even harder.

Carter had finally broken out of his three-game playoff scoring drought with two goals on Tuesday night. He still generates a high percentage of the team's scoring chances. Now, this. As for Gagne, he hasn't scored yet in the series but he really has played very effectively. He is underrated sometimes as a two-way forward but all of those two-way forward skills have been on display against the Devils.

People also forget that Gagne is one of the Flyers' big-minute penalty-killing forwards. Blair Betts and Ian Laperriere play the most, then Mike Richards after that, but then comes Gagne among the penalty-killing forwards – and in case you haven't noticed, the Flyers' penalty killers really have been the unsung heroes of this series so far.

Repeat: this just got harder. You know the news will energize a Devils team that seemed to get the life beaten out of it in the late stages of Games 3 and 4 at the Wachovia Center. It will be a very difficult dynamic on Thursday night, no question. But the Flyers have three chances to win one time, and this will only break them if they let it.

In the meantime, Carter and Gagne are "day to day." But you've heard that one before as well.