ST. LOUIS — To some, the St. Louis Blues’ announcement in July that defenseman Torey Krug had a “pre-arthritic change in his ankle” and that it could require season-ending surgery seemed suspicious.
The Blues had tried to trade Krug to the Philadelphia Flyers a year earlier, and, well, sometimes when a team and player appear to be thinking along different lines, there’s a sudden twist and the result is the player is no longer on the roster.
That must be what’s going on with Krug and the Blues, some figured.
In this case, no.
It didn’t make sense for Krug, 33, who wants to continue his 13-year NHL career and has three more years left on his contract with St. Louis. And it didn’t make sense for the Blues, who would have a hard time trading a player who could be out for the year.
But if you needed any confirmation, it came Wednesday, in the form of Krug addressing reporters for the first time publicly about the situation and tearfully acknowledging that it could be more than season-ending — it could be career-ending.
“Sorry …” he said, getting choked up at one point and pausing for 25 seconds before resuming what he was saying.
In a 15-minute news conference, Krug explained how the initial injury occurred, how much pain he’s been playing through the past few years, and what, if any, chance he has of returning to the NHL.
He initially sustained the injury that led to this situation in the second round of the Eastern Conference playoffs in 2018 when he was playing for the Boston Bruins against the Tampa Bay Lightning. Late in Game 4, he had the Lightning’s Alex Killorn on his backside and went into the boards awkwardly. He suffered a broken left ankle and was done for the series.
Torey Krug ankle injury pic.twitter.com/gueEhJv8hD
— Pete Blackburn (@PeteBlackburn) May 5, 2018
Krug missed the start of the following season — 2018-19, which was the season the Bruins would eventually lose to the Blues in the Stanley Cup Final — but he played in 64 games that year.
He stayed in Boston for the 2019-20 season and played 61 of the Bruins’ 70 games during the pandemic-shortened regular season. And after signing a seven-year, $45.5 million free-agent contract with St. Louis that summer, he played in 51 of the Blues’ 56 games in 2020-21.
But over the years, the 5-foot-9, 194-pound defenseman began to experience some arthritis from the ankle surgery, but he was able to work through it with treatment, exercises and injections.
“Anyone with arthritis knows there’s some good days and then there’s some bad days,” Krug said Wednesday. “I was able to tolerate it for so long, and we did many things to help with that. For a long time, to be honest, playing hockey was one of those things that helped with it because I was in a boot and you’re provided a lot of support that way.”
In 2023-24, Krug played in 77 games with the Blues, and he felt “good” when the regular season ended. He planned to take a few weeks off, then begin his offseason training like he’d done every summer since the injury.
“But there were some red flags,” he said. “I tried to work through it and find a way to train. I wasn’t really able to do any of the things I needed to do to prepare for the NHL season.”
Krug phoned the Blues and spoke with general manager Doug Armstrong and athletic trainer Ray Barile to give them a heads-up. The parties all agreed to continue rehabbing the injury for six to eight more weeks and then be re-evaluated. They’d decide closer to training camp in September whether surgery was needed. For Krug, the eventual outcome had started to become obvious.
“It was one of those things where you realize it wasn’t going to work,” he said. “We had to make plans otherwise.”
In a couple of weeks, Krug will have surgery called “subtalar fusion,” in which he’ll have screws inserted into the left ankle that will fuse the bones together. It’s the same surgery that golfer Tiger Woods had following his 2021 car crash, in which he suffered a broken ankle and also had pre-arthritic changes. It’s a Catch-22 in that athletes can’t continue to compete because of the pain, but the procedure also creates limitations that can make it career-threatening.
Dr. Rick Lehman, a medical director for the U.S. Center of Sports Medicine, explained to The Athletic that subtalar fusion surgery will restrict lateral movement within the foot and ankle.
“Your foot does two things: it goes up and down and then it goes side to side,” said Lehman, a former team doctor for the Blues and former part-owner of the Florida Panthers. “The subtalar joint is the thing that goes side to side. If you have arthritis, normally you would try to treat it conservatively because you want to maintain that motion.
“But if that motion is painful, and, of course, with hockey players, they’re pushing off, they’re stopping … so you have to fuse the joint. Basically what you do is you put a bone graft in there and you stop that motion, so if you’re walking on the ground, you lose that rotation, side-to-side motion.”
Lehman called the surgery a “Hail Mary” and said the odds of Krug playing in the NHL again are about 30 percent.
“It’s your last-ditch effort,” Lehman said. “On a Tommy John surgery, you know that you’re going to come back, you’re going to add 3 mph to your fastball, blah, blah, blah — a good surgery with a predictable result. This is not that. This is not, ‘Yep, I’ll see you in a year.’
“Also, he’s 33 years old, not 23. Could he come back? Yes. Hockey is a little different than football; he’s going to be wearing a boot. But I think there’s a real possibility that this is career-ending. That’s a tough surgery to come back from.”
The other aspect of the operation, Lehman said, is the recovery time. Everything may go perfectly, but it’ll still take substantial time to be ready to play again.
“How much residual pain are you going to have?” Lehman said. “Is that six months? Is that nine months? A year? You’re going to have some residual pain after this. It’s not magic where you’re just going to be pain-free. So you’ve got to figure a year, bell to bell, before you can even evaluate him for the possibility of coming back.”
Some have wondered why Krug didn’t have the surgery sooner, like after the 2023-24 season, and that’s the answer. He wasn’t going to opt for something that could end his career if there was a chance of playing through it.
“I’ve talked to many doctors, and it’s always been something that I was going to have to do regardless at some point in my life,” Krug said. “Getting it taken care of as a 33-year-old professional athlete is a little bit different. I thought I’d have to do it when I was 50 — down the road and retired. So I always knew that it was something that would have to be done. It’s just disappointing and sad that it has to be now.”
Lehman understood Krug’s logic and agreed that this surgery should be a last resort.
“You’ve got to think that every other year he’s been able to muscle his way through it,” Lehman said. “So why would you have surgery if you thought that getting the rest and doing the therapy, like you normally do, has worked? You’re probably thinking, ‘I’m going to muscle my way through it’ until he couldn’t.
“If you dislocate your shoulder, waiting the summer isn’t going to do you any good. But with this, I definitely wouldn’t recommend having surgery if you thought there was a chance that you could avoid it.”
Krug avoided it as long as he could, and now as he thinks about the long road ahead, it’s hard not to get emotional.
“Being around the rink, seeing the guys and watching the preparation they’re doing, something that I’ve been doing for 13 years — and now I’m not going to be playing this year — it’s been a grind for sure,” he said. “The pain that we go through as athletes, a lot of it you can push to the side. (But) you don’t understand what it’s going to do to you mentally. So I’ve been grinding a little bit on that front.”
And the possibility of never playing again?
“Yeah, at 33 years old, when you miss a whole year of hockey, those things cross your mind,” he said. “I don’t want to look too far ahead, but yeah, those are things that you definitely think about.”
But it was talking about the impact the surgery will have on his home life — with wife Melanie and children Saylor (5 years old), Hartford (3) and Kingston (18 months) — that Krug him teary-eyed.
“I’m going to be able to carry my kids up and down the stairs, which I haven’t been … ” he said, pausing. “I’m able to do it some days, but …”
Then when asked a follow-up question about being around the rink, Krug replied: “Yeah for sure,” before pausing again.
“It’s a big part of the people that are around you,” he said. “The Blues have been amazing. My teammates have been great. So I’ll be around for sure. That’s what I’ve known and loved for so long.”
Krug has endured several injuries during his hockey career, but this is the biggest. He realizes, though, that it comes with the territory.
“There’s a lot of things that go into it, but you want to win a Stanley Cup,” he said. “There’s other things that come into play, like making a living for your family and setting up your kids. You understand what comes with the job, and you don’t want to trade that. There’s been a lot of great memories, for sure.”
And if Krug has experienced his last memory in the league, even a doctor like Lehman, who has seen this before, has sympathy.
“This is so sad for him because what happens, hockey players are so tough, they deal with stuff,” Lehman said. “But in his mind, he really felt that, ‘Hey, I can get through this.’ So when the reality hits, the light goes off, and it’s emotional when you know you’re going to have a surgery that you might not come back from.”
(Photo: Jeff Curry / USA Today)
