Saturday night in San Jose, it almost looked like Marcus Foligno made some sort of miraculous recovery from his second core muscle surgery in as many years when somebody from the Sharks game night staff mistakenly hand-wrote Foligno’s name as an addition to the Minnesota Wild’s lineup.
Or, as Foligno joked in a texted reply to the pic of the lineup, “they miss me that much, eh?”
Well, that’s a given.
We’ll never know, but what would a healthy Foligno have meant to the Wild against some of the top teams in the second half? The Wild lost 12 of their final 14 games against the nine teams north of them in the Western Conference standings. And with Foligno out, the Wild have looked undersized and soft in the hard areas on many a night.
Foligno was in the midst of a solid season despite groin problems for much of the year. He tried to play through it, but that stabbing pain anytime he tried to shoot, hit somebody, accelerate during stops and starts or lifting his knee off the ice too high ultimately became too much to take.
The core muscle is above the pubic bone. Last offseason, he got the right side done. This season, the same surgeon in St. Louis recently did the left side.
Foligno, 32, with tongue firmly in cheek, now expects to have two good sides next year.
“It’s like I got a new suspension — a tune-up,” Foligno said. “That’s really what this was all about at the end of the day. We didn’t touch my left side last year because it was fine. And then I remember I had a groin pull in practice early on the season, and it just kind of snowballed from there. I don’t know if that was because of my right side being so tight, but my right side feels amazing, and maybe I was compensating and that hurt my left side.
“I just think the way I’ve been playing and just over the years, it’s been some rigorous years, this was probably inevitable. Unfortunately, it got to a point where it was really, really tough to skate and I couldn’t have that power to even jump up in the rush from a standstill. There was no explosiveness. I feel like now this is all behind me and I know how my right side feels after getting surgery, so I expect my left side will feel the same and I’m hoping that it’s done with these surgeries.”
What’s frustrating for Foligno, he played half the season in pain two years ago and had a down year because of it. This year, he was playing a solid game, especially physically and defensively (1.96 expected goals against per 60 minutes in his 635 five-on-five minutes), despite not being close to 100 percent.
“I found my game again and obviously a big jump from the last season and just a lot of things,” he said. “And it just sucked too because it was before Christmas when things were going well and I was getting my rhythm and you put some strings of points together and we definitely were winning. And then this kind of comes up again, flares up, and then you’re in and out of the lineup. You miss 12 games, come back in for six and you’re out for one. So you can’t get rhythm like that. I’m happy that I was able to still do something while kind of limping around for the most part in those games. But we just felt like against St. Louis at home, I tweaked it again and enough was enough. I didn’t want to keep doing this to myself and have something else go wrong on me from trying to play with one leg.”
Foligno says he is fully confident that this is not the start of an injury-plagued rest of his time with the Wild.
“I just signed a four-year deal, so I better be good to go, and I will be,” he said, laughing. “I want to be healthy and make sure that coming out of my fourth year, I’m still feeling good. I know that there’s a lot of hockey left in me. We have a lot of great years ahead of us in this team, so I want to be there for that and be 100 percent.”
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