Medical update emerges after Nils Lundkvist’s scary skate injury
Some good news for the Stars Saturday. Dr. Harjas Grewal posted on social media that Nils Lundkvist should be able to play Game 5 with a cage protecting his face.
That's a quick turnaround for what looked like a brutal injury.
The 25-year-old Swedish defenseman left Friday's game with a deep facial laceration after Michael McCarron's skate caught him on the way down.
A cage isn't a guarantee. It's a piece of armor over an open wound that has to heal before any contact returns. Lundkvist will play through pain if he plays at all.
Glen Gulutzan said earlier that the laceration was deep and that Lundkvist would be evaluated back in Dallas. He wasn't even sure if his defenseman had left for the hospital.
So this is faster than expected. Faster than most facial cuts heal. The kind of update that says more about Lundkvist's pain tolerance than the medical timeline.
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Glen Gulutzan gets a piece of his blue line back at the right time
Dallas needs Lundkvist on the ice. The Swedish defender skated over 18 minutes a night during the regular season and posted a plus-12 rating, the kind of quiet contribution coaches notice and fans miss.
He'd already added 2 assists in the first two playoff games. Replacing those minutes with a healthy scratch from the press box is not the same thing.
Is a cage a long-term solution?
No. The visor and cage combo restricts vision, gets fogged up, and feels foreign to a guy who's never worn one in the NHL. But it's the only way to play through a cut that fresh.
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John Hynes' Wild won't take it easy on him either.
The series has been physical from the opening shift, and a player wearing a cage is a player every fourth-line forward will line up for the rest of the way.
McCarron didn't intend any of this.
The 31-year-old Wild forward was just being knocked down hard. But the consequence still belongs to Dallas, and they have to decide how to use it.
Game 5 hasn't been scheduled in any updates yet.
When it lands, Lundkvist's name will be the first one watched on the warmup line.
The cage tells half the story. The other half lives in whether the 25-year-old can play his game without flinching the next time someone fires a puck at his head.
| POLL | ||
AVRIL 26 | 274 ANSWERS Medical update emerges after Nils Lundkvist’s scary skate injury Should Nils Lundkvist play Game 5 wearing a cage instead of resting longer ? | ||
| Yes | 164 | 59.9 % |
| No | 110 | 40.1 % |
| LIST OF POLLS | ||
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5 MAI 2026
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| B | P | PTS | ||
| Nathan MacKinnon | 1 | 2 | 3 | |
| Gabriel Landeskog | 1 | 1 | 2 | |
| Martin Necas | 1 | 1 | 2 | |
| Brett Kulak | - | 2 | 2 | |
| Marcus Johansson | 1 | - | 1 | |
| Kirill Kaprizov | 1 | - | 1 | |
| Valeri Nichushkin | 1 | - | 1 | |
| Nicolas Roy | 1 | - | 1 | |
| Brent Burns | - | 1 | 1 | |
| Ross Colton | - | 1 | 1 | |
| Ryan Hartman | - | 1 | 1 | |
| Daemon Hunt | - | 1 | 1 | |
| Nazem Kadri | - | 1 | 1 | |
| Brock Nelson | - | 1 | 1 | |
| Danila Yurov | - | 1 | 1 | |
| Mats Zuccarello | - | 1 | 1 | |
| Nick Blankenburg | - | - | - | |
| Matthew Boldy | - | - | - | |
| Jack Drury | - | - | - | |
| Brock Faber | - | - | - | |
| STATS COMPLÈTES | ||||