Flyers’ Tyson Foerster now out for rest of the season

Philadelphia Flyers winger Tyson Foerster is currently out with an upper-body injury but we just got some even worse news.

Announced by the team on Wednesday morning, after combing through their options going forward in his injury recovery, the decision was made for Foerster to undergo surgery. A successful surgery took place on Monday but now, the recovery timeline has been extended to five months.

Foerster suffered his injury on a completely freak play. During the Dec. 1 game against the Pittsburgh Penguins, just minutes after scoring a goal, the 23-year-old winger wound up for a giant one-timer effort and instead of sending a rocket into the back of the net, he whiffed on the puck and crumpled down to the ice, clutching his right shoulder. It was not a pretty sight whatsoever and the best we were all hoping for was some awkward dislocation that would put him on the sidelines for a week or two.

Unfortunately, it was not that and was set to be a long-term absence, but now it’s going to be so much longer than we thought.

Originally, when Foerster was first declared out with his injury, he was set to miss two to three months. Which is obviously terrible but with some quick future-looking and glaring at the calendar, the key Flyers winger was potentially going to return to the ice shortly after the Olympic break, or at the very latest in early March. We were all dreaming of this possibility for him to re-join the team with the Flyers still in the middle of playoff contention and provide a substantial boost to this team as they make the playoffs for the first time in six years.

Instead, Foerster will now be out for five months — and by the wording provided by the team, this is now five more months — which takes his absence through the remainder of the regular season.

Flyers are going to severely miss Foerster

When the original timeline was still in-tact, there was a sense that the Flyers can try and patchwork this lineup together to try and withstand Foerster not being there. For the work the 23-year-old does on both ends of the puck and in all three zones, he’s not really replaceable, but throw a couple hot streaks from unlikely sources and then we could just try to push through a few more weeks of Foerster-less Flyers, and it’s doable. Now, he’s just not coming back unless Philadelphia miraculously has a deep playoff run.

Players like Carl Grundstrom have stepped up for the time being, but that doesn’t really feel sustainable for the remaining 50 games of the season. And with young wingers like Nikita Grebenkin not taking full advantage of his increased opportunity, and Alex Bump not quite being ready for his call-up to the NHL, there doesn’t appear to be a sure-fire solution to Foerster missing for the rest of the season.

The Flyers might just continue to try and persevere through this absence, as long as Grundstrom keeps on scoring some timely goals, or they could bring a young winger up to really try and get something with a little bit more firepower cooking in the lineup. At least they now have even more time to make those choices and give the Bumps and Barkeys of the world a month or two longer to see if they really deserve that opportunity.

We’ll see just how this might affect the Flyers’ season plans, but for now it’s just terrible to think we’re not going to see our favorite winger from Alliston, Ontario in the Orange and Black again until next fall.

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