Connor McDavid had fractured his foot or ankle and played through a Stanley Cup playoff series anyway because that's the culture around injuries and playoff hockey.
Kris Knoblauch confirmed it after the Edmonton Oilers were eliminated during their exit meetings, though if you watched McDavid closely enough over the final few games of the series, something was clearly off.
"My advantage is my speed burst, you know, that quick step," said McDavid. "I had none of that."
"Connor and Dickinson both had fractures around the foot, ankle area, playing through a lot of pain," said Knoblauch. "And yeah, that was the two most significant injuries, and they spent a lot of time with the training staff to get through that. But obviously, it affected their play.
"A lot of admiration for them for wanting to be out there and contributing as much as they did during the playoffs."
Jason Dickinson, as noted by Knoblauch, was also quietly grinding through the same thing while everyone fixated on his captain. But again, this is the culture surrounding injuries. It is perfectly normal for two players with fractured bones to dress for a playoff game without ever considering whether they should take some time off, because there is none.
"My main goal when I found out I fractured my ankle was okay, well, when can I play?" said Dickinson. "It wasn't a matter of figuring out, how much time do we take off for this to heal?"
Before Game 5, Knoblauch called McDavid a game-time decision.
"Never in doubt," was McDavid's response about playing.
He logged 8:38 in the first period, eight minutes in the second, 7:41 in the third, on a broken foot, against the Ducks, who had already taken a 3-1 series lead and had the potential to win the series at Rogers Place.
But this isn't really about just admiring McDavid's pain tolerance, because what he did is completely standard in professional hockey, and that tells you a lot about the sport.
The playoffs operate under a different set of rules, physical ones included, and the culture around playing hurt is so deeply embedded that opting out of a game for anything short of a missing limb carries a social cost most players aren't willing to pay.
Training staff across the league spend the month of April performing something closer to triage than routine maintenance, managing fractures, tears and separations well enough that a player can get through two periods, maybe three, before the next round of treatment.
But these games matter in a way the regular season doesn't; the rosters are thinner, and players like Connor McDavid playing at less than full capacity are still a huge hurdle for any team to get around.
Of course, more athletes across more sports are starting to ask whether the expectation to play through serious injury is something they actually signed up for or something that was just always assumed. Hockey hasn't fully reckoned with that question yet, and they're probably the furthest behind.
McDavid isn't interested in the whole debate. He signed up for two more years in Edmonton, he suited up every night with a big injury, and when someone suggested he might not play, he looked at them like they'd said something in another language.
Because this is hockey, and this is it's culture.
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