Off the bat, I hate this “unfit to play” with no description. The NHL has us asking “Is it allergies or ‘Rona?” with every fucking tweet and it’s obnoxious. If it was just “we have this many people sick and this guy is out with a lower-body injury” I’d be fine with that. Otherwise, we’re just guessing at everything.
Anyway, back to Crawford. Corey Crowford is “unfit to participate” in practice for what sounds like a while. If this was just a one-day thing then Colliton wouldn’t have said that this gives other guys (Subban, Delia, Lankinen, and Tomkins) a chance to compete. In Scott Power’s Athletic article from after today’s first training camp practice, he quotes Jeremy Colliton, who sounds set on Crawford being out for a while. Colliton said:
“We’ll probably rotate those three guys — Subban, Delia and Lankinen. We’ll rotate them through the first group. It’s a great opportunity for them and a great opportunity to evaluate them and we expect a lot of competition and we have confidence in all three of those guys that they’re going to make it hard on us and play at a high level. We told them it’s going to be based on how they perform and they’re all going to be given equal opportunity.”
Once again with the “unfit to play” spiel, we don’t know if this is illness or injury. With the assumption that it’s injury, I hope that it’s not another concussion. Crawford has had terrible ones the past few seasons and Id hate for him to deal with another. He could just be unprepared for the season to start fitness-wise, but we won’t know with all of this going on.
Crawford goes UFA after this mini-playoff and I’m looking forward to what the Hawks are going to do. It wouldn’t be the end of the world, to me, if we lost him. Crawford is an amazing goalie, he’s given up Stanley Cups and has been doing okay this season -as okay as you can be on a team where defense is abysmal. But if something happens and the Hawks went for, say Braden Holty, I wouldn’t be too pissed off. Even if we got Holtby as a solid backup so we had some consistency if Crawford was injured again, I’d see it as a win. Goaltending has been so unsteady for the Hawks the last short while and if we want to see an actual playoff run again that’s going to have to change. No matter how painful.
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