Sidney Crosby underwent successful left wrist surgery on Wednesday, Ron Hextall announced.
The surgery was performed by Dr. Robert Hotchkiss of New York in collaboration with team physician Dr. Dharmesh Vyas of UPMC.
The Penguins said in a team release that Crosby will miss the start of training camp, and is expected to be sidelined a minimum of six weeks. A six-week timeline would have him set for a return around Oct. 20, the week after the Penguins' Oct. 12 season opener.
The injury that necessitated the surgery was something that Crosby has dealt with for a number of years. The surgery was done on his left wrist, the same one Crosby had arthroscopic wrist debridement surgery on last August.
"This is not a new injury for Sid. It is something that he has played through for years," Hextall said. "After exhausting all minimally-invasive options and much discussion, it was decided that surgery was in his best interest."
Given the fact that the projected recovery timeline has Crosby sidelined until a week into the start of the regular season at minimum, I asked Hextall why the surgery was done so late into the offseason.
"There was a process to go through at the end of the season," Hextall explained. "It had bothered him, Sid's been dealing with this for numerous years now. So at the end of the year, you let the body heal, test things out. There's just a process. It takes weeks to figure out where the wrist is at, whether you could get through another year. At some point you ramp things up along the way, and the conclusion that we we came to was that this procedure was the best way to proceed. We all -- including Sid -- wish that if we had known this a month or two months ago, that'd be great, but we are where we are."
Hextall didn't have an update on Malkin's status, saying that the team expects to have a "better idea of where he's at" during training camp.
Regardless, it looks like the Penguins will be starting the season without their top two centers.
Hextall said that he thinks the Penguins "have enough talent to hold the fort" until Crosby and Malkin return, and said that the circumstances present opportunities for other forwards, namely Evan Rodrigues, Radim Zohorna, Michael Chaput, Dominik Simon, and Brian Boyle, as well as increased roles for Jeff Carter and Teddy Blueger.
"It's not ideal, let's be honest," Hextall said. "But we're not going to sit there and and feel sorry for ourselves. We have to we still have to find ways to to win games. ... This is going to be a group effort to make up for the deficit that we have here. There's no sense crying about it. Every team goes through it, and we're going through it."
Hextall all but ruled out bringing in outside help to fill in during Crosby and Malkin's absences, citing the temporary nature of long-term injured relief. Teams can only benefit from LTIR as long as a player is on LTIR, and both Crosby and Malkin are expected to return during the regular season.
"The problem is if you use it, you got to go back and get cap-compliant when Sid and Geno come back," Hextall said. "So it's not as easy as it looks, that we just sign a guy to a contract for a couple months and then player X comes back or player Y comes back. But that's not the way the system works. We have to become compliant when both players come back, so we can can't add a big dollar player here. Because they're both going to be back."
Hextall said that with both players out of the lineup, the Penguins are going to have to "tighten things up" with defense and goaltending, and their group of forwards are going to have to elevate their games.
"We need guys to step up offensively and do a good job for us," he said. "We've got a lot of proven players up there, obviously, who have scored a lot of goals and made a lot of play in this league. ... We look forward to having the two of them back, and that'll be almost like an addition to our team. But we've got some heavy work to do early in the season, we have to get off to a good start."
