Keith Ballard Injured Against Penguins

The Wild suffered a 3-2 loss on the road last night to the Penguins in the team’s second preseason match-up. During that game defenseman Keith Ballard suffered a lower body injury.

The injury is reported to be minor and the team was just “being cautious,” according to Michael Russo of the Star Tribune.

During the game Ballard had soreness in the area where he had off-season sports hernia surgery and the team didn’t want to push it, since this was just a preseason game. Ballard sustained the injury in March, but pushed through it to compete in the playoffs. He was the only player on the team that required off-season surgery, which was announced when the rash of injuries that’s inevitably revealed after a playoff elimination came out.

During the game he was replaced by off-season acquisition Stu Bickel, who coach Mike Yeo was trying out at right wing for the night. Bickel moved down the bench and took a seat with the defenseman, but wound up never touching the ice as a defender.

It doesn’t sound like he will, but should Ballard miss any significant time, it may be an opportunity for some of the many young defenders to step up, creating one extra open position in the third pairing D. As it stands there are still a number of defenseman battling for spots, though based on camp and comments made by the coaching staff, it would seem that the decision is really between Jonathon Blum and rookies Christian Folin and Matt Dumba. Though Yeo has praised the play of Bickel a couple of times during camp. If you’re a Wild fan you have to hope that the team selects skill over size and gives a player with upside a shot over Bickel, who finished last season with a 39.5% Corsi For %, which was -12.4% relative for the Rangers.

That’s terrible.

More should be revealed about the Ballard injury today, but, as I said, it’s not expected to be anything serious according to the initial reports.

Other Injuries

– Justin Fontaine had been nursing a sore groin, but played last night on a line with Mikko Koivu and Thomas Vanek. Fontaine and that entire line looked great through stretches of the game. It appears that there aren’t any worries about the injury lingering.

– Erik Haula got injured after colliding with the boards last night, though he stayed in the game. With how cautious teams are being right now (especially with all the injuries this preseason) the team would have taken him out of the game if there was any concern.

– Jason Zucker was on the receiving end of a few cheap shots last night and finally had it. He got into a scrap with Simon Despres. That’s 6-foot-4, 215 pound Simon Despres. Zucker is 5-foot-11, 188 pounds. It went exactly how you’d guess it went. Michael Russo mentioned in his game recap that Zucker “was seen walking into the medical room after the game.” There doesn’t appear to be any reason for concern there though.

Update: 2:02pm

Apparently Thomas Vanek is day-to-day (that’s how they’re classifying Ballard as well), but they have not yet said what Vanek is day-to-day with. Chad Graff tweeted out that Yeo said Vanek is sore “after getting bumped.”