Brandon Dubinsky out 3-4 weeks
In a news event completely out of left field, the New York Rangers have suffered a tremendous blow to their roster, losing leading scorer Brandon Dubinsky. Per Kevin Allen's tweet:
@kausatoday Kevin AllenRangers leading scorer Brandon Dubinsky has a stress fracture in the fibula in his left leg. He'll be out three to four weeks.
No word yet on how it happened or who (if anyone) will be called up to replace him.
Updating...here's some various quotes around the twitterverse and Jesse Spector's blog update, that Dig Deep was nice enough to compile:
On how the injury happened:
"No one specific thing. He’s been complaining a little bit about soreness. We gave him a day off here and there. But there was no one specific thing. They looked at it yesterday and looked at it again today more closely, and it’s a stress fracture. … He’s been struggling through it for the past couple of weeks here."
On the mention of calling up someone like Chad Kolarik or Evgeny Grachev:
Tortorella: "This is our team. At this point, this is our team."On the updated lines for tonight:
Reconfigured #NYR lines: Fedotenko-Boyle-Prust, Avery-Anisimov-Gaborik, Wolski-Stepan-Zuccarello, Drury-Newbury-Weise
As was pointed out, the timing is a bit fortuitous, at least as much as it can be losing your most versatile forward. The all-star break is approaching, so if Dubinsky is back in 3 weeks, he'll miss a total of 9 games, with a possible return of Feb. 11th vs Atlanta. If you tack on another week, it is only 11 games, with Feb 17th vs the Kings a possible return date.
The team will be getting Ryan Callahan back in approximately two weeks, and Christensen should not be far behind. The team will likely stay the course right now, so don't expect a reactionary trade or any moves between now the all-star break.
