Montreal Canadiens fans don’t need to be reminded what happened to Kirby Dach last season, they know it all too well. In just the second game of the regular season, the center was rocked by a Jarred Tinordi hit, suffering both a tear of his anterior cruciate ligament and medial collateral ligament. While the season was just starting, Dach’s was ending.
ACL Injury Stats
According to Sportsmd.com there are 250,000 ACL injuries per year in the USA. Orthopedic surgeons perform around 100,000 surgeries per year. The website also reports that one in ten patients undergoing surgery never resume sports activities, according to Italian traumatology researcher Albert Gobbi and colleagues. One in four people have a decreased level of activity and six in ten regain their pre-injury level of activity. While this may look like a bleak outcome, this includes average Joes and not professional athletes who have the very best physical therapist to work with.
Players Who Have Gone Under the Knife
As serious as ligament tears are, they are becoming quite a regular occurrence in professional sports. Just ask Minnesota Wild’s Mason Shaw, the 25-year-old was a fourth-round pick for the state of hockey at the 2017 draft, but he is currently dealing with his fourth ACL tear. Now, don’t panic, Shaw is a cautionary tale if there ever was one, but he’s not a regular occurrence.
Back in 2008, arguably the best quarterback in NFL history, Tom Brady suffered both ACL and MCL tears and came back to continue his awe inspiring career without skipping a beat. He went on to win another four Super Bowls and was pretty much stronger than ever.
Back to the NHL, at camp before the 2022-2023 season, then-Vancouver Canuck Ilya Mikheyev suffered an ACL injury and decided to play through it. A few months later, in January 2023, he had to call time on his season because he was unable to keep playing through the pain. Fast forward to this last season, he was raring to go and took part in 78 games, picking up 31 points in the process. He did miss a few games in the playoffs because of an undisclosed injury, but he came back and was healthy enough to be traded to the Chicago Blackhawks in June.
In Carolina, Andrei Svechnikov also suffered an ACL injury in the second half of the 2022-2023 campaign which required season ending surgery. He made his 2023-2024 season debut seven months later and even though his year was plagued with upper-body injuries/illness, they had nothing to do with his reconstructed ligament. Through it all, he managed to gather 52 points in 59 games and is still part of the Hurricanes lethal top-line.
Montreal’s Very Own Cautionary Tale: the General
Habs fans who followed the team around the Centennial year will no doubt remember that Andrei ‘the General’ Markov suffered an ACL injury on April 30, 2010 which ended his playoffs after only eight games. Who knows how far the Canadiens could have gone had Markov been present for the whole postseason.
The Canadiens top blueliner missed the first 10 games of the following season before coming back to action. He played seven games, collecting a goal and two assists before being injured once again. Again, his knee was the issue and he needed both an ACL reconstruction and repairs on a meniscus.
In October 2011, La Presse published an interview with orthopedic surgeon Jacques Toueg in which the specialist explained that in roughly 90 percent of cases an athlete who undergoes ACL reconstruction will be fine in six months and be able to play as he was pre-injury. However, that percentage drops to 70 percent for an athlete who undergoes a second ACL reconstruction. In other words three out of ten patients will never be in top shape again.
Ten months after suffering his second ACL tear, Markov still wasn’t back, as there was inflammation in his knee. In December 2011, he underwent an arthroscopic surgery to remove debris and possible scar tissues. The blueliner would end up only playing 13 games in the 2011-2012 campaign.
Related: Canadiens: Can Dach Get Back on Track?
Markov would only be back to full health after the lockout which delayed the star of the 2012-2013 NHL season until January. While waiting for the conflict to be over, he played with Chekhov Vityaz in the KHL, lining up for 21 games and picking up a goal and five assists in the process.
Even though Markov had to go through a few operations and lengthy healing process, he did come back as strong as ever, playing five more seasons in the NHL. Unable to reach a new deal with Canadiens GM Marc Bergevin at the expiry of his contract after the 2016-2017 season, he went back to Russia as a free-agent. When he left, the General had competed in 990 NHL games and unfortunately, he was never given the opportunity to reach 1,000 games. A puzzling move from Bergevin as he resigned Tomas Plekanec after trading him to the Toronto Maple Leafs to allow him to play his 1000th NHL game with the Habs.
As scary as the Markov knee saga was, it’s important to remember that after the initial injury and surgery, he came back to action quite quickly. Perhaps he was a bit rushed and came back too quickly. That definitely won’t be the case with Kirby Dach. He was injured in October 2023 and when he returns to proper action, it will be September 2024.
Or course, it’s always a possibility for an athlete to reinjure themselves, but if there is such a thing as karma, Dach should be left alone after dealing with so many different injuries in his young career. Having signed a four-year “show me” deal when he first arrived in Montreal, he must be looking forward to finally having an opportunity to show what he can do.
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