BOSTON – While the vast majority of the concern was for hospitalized Ottawa forward Scott Sabourin following a violent collision in Saturday night’s 5-2 Bruins win over the Ottawa Senators TD Garden, there was another injured player on the first period play. Sabourin threw a hit on Bruins forward David Backes against the side boards that left him knocked out cold before he hit the ice, and the 27-year-old was stretchered off the ice after medical personnel worked on him for 10 minutes.
Backes stayed on the ice until Sabourin had been wheeled off and then the 35-year-old also exited the game after understandably looking pretty upset on the ice in the collision’s aftermath. Bruce Cassidy said following the game that one could “do the math” on the upper body injury, meaning that Backes had suffered another suspected concussion.
That’s concerning news for an aging player with a history of concussions, who was done for the night after two shifts and a grand total of 34 seconds on the ice.
“I haven’t talked to Backes, obviously [he] left, upper-body injury, can probably do the math on that one,” said Bruce Cassidy. “We’ll see [on Monday], probably have a better idea on the mental part of it. But I’ve heard Scott [Sabourin] is in the hospital and doing well in terms of he’s aware, he’s alert, so that’s good news.
“We play hard and we battle each other, but you don’t want to see something like that happen to a young guy, especially. He was in Manchester when I was in Providence, and he’s battled his way to get to the National Hockey League. Those are the guys you root for and hopefully he’s okay.”
Hopefully Backes is okay as well after netting his first point of the season in Tuesday night’s win over the Sharks, and playing solid hockey to start this season after doing a ton of extra work on his skating this summer. With the Bruins already down Joakim Nordstrom, Par Lindholm and Brett Ritchie among their forward group, the Black and Gold are beginning to dig very deeply into their organization depth at the AHL level.
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