Breaking: Travis Hamonic suffers very painful looking injury.

Despite the fact that he would leave the game and was quickly ruled out of the contest thereafter, New York Islanders defenseman Travis Hamonic deserves a lot of credit for gritting it out and finishing his shift on the ice. That will be little consolation for the Islanders if he's out long term however, and although no official word yet has come from the Islanders you can clearly see in the video replay that he was in a considerable amount of pain, and appeared to need the support of his stick at times to stand.

Hamonic was injured on Thursday night when he took what honestly looked like a harmless check from Columbus Blue Jackets' forward Scott Hartnell. It's hard to tell what happened exactly, but the broadcast crew did hypothesize that Hartnell's knee may have jammed into Hamonic's thigh leading to whatever injury he sustained.

With the injuries the Islanders have already sustained, any long term injury to a player who fills as large a role as Hamonic does could very well spell the end of any playoff hopes they had coming into this season.

[pub]