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Ray Emery’s lower body injury could throw wrench into Anaheim’s postseason plans

Ray Emery

Anaheim Ducks goalie Ray Emery makes a glove save with just over four seconds left in their their NHL hockey game against the Chicago Blackhawks, Saturday, March 26, 2011 in Chicago. The Ducks won 2-1. (AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast)

AP

Ray Emery’s comeback season in Anaheim has truly been a great story to witness. From overcoming a degenerative condition in his hip called avascular necrosis that threatened to end his career to getting back in the NHL just a year later and being able to start and succeed all over again is indeed amazing. The fact that he and Dan Ellis have been keeping the Anaheim Ducks alive for a shot at the playoffs while starter Jonas Hiller is out with vertigo-like symptoms has made for a huge boost to the team.

Last night’s 6-2 win over San Jose helped keep the Ducks rolling along toward clinching a playoff spot in the west but it came at a cost as Emery left the game with a lower body injury. Emery pulled himself from the game and considering the Ducks pulled off a win, all hope was not lost.

Now that Emery is dealing with a new injury, attention turns to him as to whether or not he’s seeing old problems flare up again in his hip and The Orange County Register’s Eric Stephens finds out that Emery’s status in Anaheim with a huge home-and-home set against the Kings is in question and the worries are magnified all around.

Emery said he felt some tightness at the start of the second period and realized that it was best he not try to play through it with the team holding a two-goal lead.

“I felt a little bit of something a bit funny and kind of tried it out for five to 10 minutes there,” he said. ”I kind of told them that I thought it’d probably be best if I got out of there and took care of myself.”

Ducks coach Randy Carlyle didn’t elaborate on the source of Emery’s injury. Dan Ellis finished the game as Emery returned the bench later in the second after a spell in the training room.

“His status is the same,” Carlyle said. ”He’s got a lower-body injury that we’re going to be very precautionary about. We felt that it was best for him to work out off ice and have a treatment this morning and we’ll make an assessment tomorrow morning [after] the morning skate.”


It’s more than understandable that Carlyle didn’t want to cough up any more information about Emery as everyone wants to speculate and worry about how his hip will hold up. After all, it’s not as if Emery was dealing with a typical run of the mill injury, it was something rather serious in nature that required some radical treatment to fix so that he could even play.

If Emery can’t play at all, the pressure to win falls on Dan Ellis’ shoulders as Hiller is still not totally ready to come back and play, if at all. Ellis has done well with the Ducks going 6-3-1 with a 2.66 goals against average and a .904 save percentage. They’re average numbers and considering how well Emery had been playing, it’ll put the onus on the Ducks defense to tighten things up. Fortunately for the Ducks they’ll have to try and hold down a Kings team that has already clinched a playoff spot and one playing without their top scorer in Anze Kopitar.