Breaking: Catastrophic update on JVR from the Flyers.

The Philadelphia Flyers have just suffered a huge blow to kick off the 2018 - 2019 National Hockey League regular season.

On Saturday night the Philadelphia Flyers faced off against the Colorado Avalanche in a game in which they suffered their very first loss of the regular season. It was a tough defeat by a margin of 5 to 2 but the biggest loss for the Flyers on that night will not go down on the scoreboard. During the games 's opening period van Riemsdyk went down after he appeared to take a puck off the side of his right leg, a leg that he was favoring as he headed back to the bench and the locker room. 

At the time based on the video replays that we were able to get a hold of things did not look particularly serious, although there was some concern when the Flyers announced rather quickly that JVR would not return to the game on Saturday night, fans still held out hope that this was just a minor issue for van Riemsdyk. Unfortunately the fans who were holding out hope could not have been more wrong and on Monday general manager Ron Hextall dropped some particularly bad news on the Flyers fan base. 

According to a report from the Philadelphia Flyers official website, general manager  Ron Hextall has confirmed that van  Riemsdyk will now miss the next 5 to 6 weeks as a result of the lower body injury that he suffered when facing off against the Colorado Avalanche on Saturday night. This is of course an unmitigated disaster for the Flyers who just signed van Riesemdyk to a big contract that pays him an average annual value of $7 million per season, a move that many felt the Flyers absolutely had to make. 

As the Flyers continue to build up their young talent on the blue line with standout players like Shayne Gostisbehere and Ivan Provorov one of the organizations key weaknesses was their lack of scoring depth. JVR was brought in to be a significant contributor to that scoring depth and the fact that he could now miss the better part of 2 months with this injury could make that a very difficult task for him indeed. JVR not only needs to take the time to recover from this injury but he will need to get back up to speed very quickly once hedoes recover. 

Now the Flyers have not provided any details regarding the specific nature of van Riemsdyk's injury but given the information that we do have at our disposal we can speculate a little on what may have happened. Given that this injury was caused by a puck it seems like any type of ligament or tendon tearing would be out of the question and that would lead us down a path that would suggest a bone bruise or perhaps a fracture could be the likely culprit. Generally fractures around the knee area take 6 weeks to heal which would put us right on the timeline of JVR's recovery. Bone bruises on the other hand can also be quite seriously and can sometimes take over a year to fully recover. These seems like the two most likely causes of his injury but that is only speculation at this time.

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