BUFFALO – When Owen Power crashed feet first into the boards last Thursday, it appeared the Sabres might lose the stud defenseman for the rest of their second-round series against the Montreal Canadiens.
Power briefly left Game 5 before returning to the bench and testing the injury during breaks. Late in the contest, he played two shifts.
He kept gutting out the injury in the Sabres’ last two games of the Stanley Cup Playoffs. In Monday’s 3-2 overtime loss in Game 7, he skated a season-high 28 minutes, 47 seconds.
During his end-of-season media availability on Wednesday in KeyBank Center, Power, 23, did not reveal the injury he was battling.
But Sabres general manager Jarmo Kekalainen said Power had a Grade 3 ankle sprain “that was getting heavily taped up” so he could play.
Incredibly, the injury did not appear to hinder Power.
“I thought (he) played some of the best games at the end of the Montreal series,” Kekalainen said.
Power downplayed his injury – “Everyone’s kind of a little banged up at the end of the year,” he said – and thanked the training staff and his wife for helping him play through it.
“I was in a good spot, and a lot of good people around me that know what they’re doing, and were able to help me to play those last two games,” he said.
Power doesn’t believe the injury will impact his offseason training.
Some other injury updates from Kekalainen and players are below.
“We had a lot of banged-up players,” Kekalainen said. “Every team in the league has banged-up players. Our players are not the type of guys that want to make any excuses and neither do we. But there were a lot of guys that were struggling through injuries in the playoffs.”
– Center Tage Thompson, who appeared to be nursing an injury, said he “had some low-back stuff going on most of the playoffs.”
“Nothing ridiculous, but just stuff from a long season,” he said. “Guys are always playing through stuff, especially in playoffs, not a lot of time to recover.”
Thompson scored five goals, a total that tied for the team lead with winger Zach Benson, and a team-high 15 points in 11 games in the playoffs.
– Kekalainen said defenseman Logan Stanley, who was scratched for the final four games of the second round, tried to play through an undisclosed injury “that was a lot worse than he let on.”
“He told us that at the exit meetings, that he didn’t want anybody to really think that he wasn’t able to play, but we could see it,” he said.
– Kekalainen said center Sam Carrick, who returned for Game 3 in Montreal but played just 6 minutes, 17 seconds, came back too early from a left arm injury that sidelined him 15 contests. Carrick sat out the last four games.
“That just showed the character, the desire to play and help the team,” Kekalainen said. “That’s how hockey players are built.”
– Kekalainen said forward Justin Danforth, who did not play after breaking his kneecap in the fourth game of the season, is “pretty close to being healthy.”
After undergoing surgery to repair his kneecap, Kekalainen said Danforth had another procedure to clean up cartilage “that that was bugging him with his movement.”
“Tough season with him losing pretty much the whole season with a freak injury like that,” he said. “… He was going through his recovery hoping to come back this year, but he should be fully healthy next year.”
– Rookie center Noah Ostlund, who suffered a lower-body injury in Game 5 of the Sabres’ first-round series against the Boston Bruins and missed the rest of the playoffs, said he has been skating and might’ve been available in the later in the Eastern Conference final if the Sabres had beaten Montreal.
“I’ll be fine here in a couple of weeks, I hope,” he said.