Sielski: To Laughton, it was more than just a play

It was a hockey play, nothing more or less. There were just less than four minutes left in the first period Wednesday night of the Flyers' 2-1 victory in Game 4 of their first-round series against the Washington Capitals. Scott Laughton, speeding down the left wing, the puck on his stick, tried to hold a hairpin turn to the front of the Capitals' net, and John Carlson did what he was supposed to do. Carlson is the Capitals' best defenseman - as fast as most forwards and, at 6-foot-3 and 215, two inches taller and 25 pounds heavier than Laughton - and he got himself close to Laughton and pushed him off course, putting his hands and stick to Laughton's torso just as Laughton cut toward the net. Laughton careened into the boards. Skating, even for players in the National Hockey League, is still speed on knives.

Laughton was down, and he stayed down, prone on the ice, his arms under his face, the Wells Fargo Center filling with a sick silence as he lay there. Jim McCrossin, the Flyers' trainer, shuffled out to him, as did other members of the team's medical and training staff. Three of Laughton's teammates - Claude Giroux, Wayne Simmonds, and Shayne Gostisbehere - lingered near him, each of them bent at the waist to look at him, maybe to whisper encouraging words. Carlson stood in front of the Capitals' bench, leaning on the boards. It was a hockey play, nothing more or less.

"You never like to see that," Carlson said. "I was thinking about him. I'm hoping he's fine. It's just one of those plays. We're kind of even, and he's trying to stickhandle through me and take it to the net, and I'm trying to defend him.

"It's tough to talk about. You never want to see that happen. It's just one of those plays that you feel like you do a lot in the game, and it never ends up like that. I feel for him. I hope he's fine. But I don't know. I'm not going to let him walk to the net."

Laughton is 21 years old. He was the Flyers' first-round draft pick in 2012. This was just the third playoff game of his brief NHL career; he had re-entered the Flyers' lineup after Game 1 of this series, when Sean Couturier suffered an upper-body injury. What did the team want and expect out of Laughton? "Go out and be himself," Flyers coach Dave Hakstol had said. "He's been a good player for us all year. . . . He'll bring pace. He'll bring tenacity. And I know he's going to be a guy who's not afraid to play."

That much was clear on that play. He was making a strong move toward the net, to create a scoring chance for a team whose season would end with one more loss. And now the doctors and trainers were wrapping a red harness around his head and crisscrossing white straps across his body to immobilize him, and they were sliding him on to a stretcher to wheel him off the ice and get him to Thomas Jefferson Hospital, six miles away, for what the Flyers, in an official statement, called "precautionary reasons." He spent the night at Jefferson, the Flyers said later. All tests were negative.

No one knew that then. The players, from both teams, tapped their sticks against the ice, and the crowd gave Laughton a standing ovation. And everyone went back to the game, or tried.

"You stop thinking about the game altogether," Flyers defenseman Andrew MacDonald said.

No, what you think about is how thin the line between safety and devastation can be in this sport. You think about the stupidity that so many people showed Monday night, when the Flyers handed out translucent bracelets and fans threw them on to the rink, when one stray, unseen trinket could have caused a player to fall and injure himself. The players think about those things, too, sometimes, when they allow themselves to.

"Obviously, the fans were frustrated with what was going on," MacDonald said. "We just tried to move past it. Obviously, there's always a risk every time we go out there, whether it's tripping into the boards or what happened to Scott, or you could take a puck to the face or whatever. Anything can happen."

MacDonald himself has a three-inch scar penciling across the left side of his face, just below his eye. In November, while he was on the Lehigh Valley Phantoms, the Flyers' affiliate in the American Hockey League, a puck struck him in the face during a practice.

"Anything can happen in a split second," he said. "You just don't have time to think about those things when you're out on the ice. The game's too fast. If you think about something, you're going to be a quarter-second too late. That's the difference between someone getting loose and scoring, making a mental mistake. You just focus and have a really good mindset. That's the important thing."

That was all two players were doing Wednesday night, when they met at that moment. Scott Laughton went hard to the net, and John Carlson did his best to stop him. It was a hockey play, nothing more or less, until it was something more, until for one of them it was almost everything.

msielski@phillynews.com

@MikeSielski