It’s never a good sign when things continue to break. Windows, lawn equipment or your hand. Doesn’t matter. Bad all the way around.
Which is the scenario that Penguins defenseman Brian Dumoulin encountered this past postseason.
After taking a David Savard slapshot off the hand with about eight minutes to go in Game 5 of the Eastern Conference quarterfinals against Columbus, Dumoulin’s right hand was damaged.
Severely. Repeatedly. Irreparably. At least for the time being.
“It was hurting pretty bad,” Dumoulin said Monday afternoon while reflecting on the six-year, $24.6 million contract extension he signed in the morning, his hand somehow still attached to his 6-foot-4, 207-pound frame. “That’s when you have to try to play through it the best you can.”
Dumoulin dutifully did, but his hand did not cooperate. It kept breaking. And the pain kept coming.
“It would get better for a little bit,” Dumoulin said. “I’d do a cross-check then it would break again. It was a process.”
One that has reached its end, too. Dumoulin said he did nothing with the hand for about three weeks, and thankfully that was enough to avoid the insertion of screws or plates.
“It was tough to play with it, but obviously everybody had injuries,” Dumoulin said. “It’s all healed up now. They were deciding on surgery or not at the end of the season, but doctors saw a little bit of healing. We gave it about three weeks, and I kind of have been testing it out the last week. I’ve skated, and there have been no problems. I’m happy about it.”
Where specifically did Dumoulin break in his hand? Maybe it was the wrist. Or a metacarpal. There are, according to Wikipedia anyway, 27 bones in one’s hand.
“They told me, but I have no idea,” Dumoulin said.
Basically, Dumoulin explained, it’s the area on the top of his hand, between his middle and ring fingers.
In the playoffs, Dumoulin routinely took the option for morning skates and practices. When he did skate, he was almost always among the first group off.
And now we know why.
“I don’t even know,” Dumoulin said when asked how many times his hand broke and re-broke. “It would feel like it would start to heal, then all of a sudden I’d do a cross-check and I’d have to get off the ice and get it shot up again or something. I don’t know.
“It was obviously something I didn’t want. Sometimes you would not feel it until after the game. I don’t know. I have no idea. You just play with it and don’t worry about what it is.”
Jason Mackey: jmackey@post-gazette.com and Twitter @JMackeyPG.
First Published: July 24, 2017, 8:22 p.m.