While the Blackhawks 2021 season has been shockingly fun and competitive, there have been a ton of oddities when it comes to injuries throughout the roster. Today’s (non-)update is just more of the same.
After shoulder and double-hip surgery ended his 2019-2020 season, defenseman Brent Seabrook hasn’t been able to skate regularly for nearly two months after “tweaking” his back in a pre-training camp session in early January. Unfortunately, following Blackhawks practice on Tuesday afternoon, head coach Jeremy Colliton had no updates or optimism to offer:
Jeremy Colliton said there’s no update on Brent Seabrook (back), Andrew Shaw (concussion protocol) or Dylan Strome (concussion protocol). #Blackhawks
— Charlie Roumeliotis (@CRoumeliotis) March 2, 2021
Seabrook was the only player listed above to be injured outside of game-action, so we haven’t even been afforded the luxury of diagnosing (or even seeing) what happened for ourselves.
And Colliton isn’t helping:
Jeremy Colliton reluctant to give any sort of detail about Brent Seabrook's progress as he works his way back from a back injury. All he would say is that Seabrook is around and has been on the ice a few times.
— Mark Lazerus (@MarkLazerus) March 2, 2021
At this point in his career, and with three more years left on his contract at a $6.875M cap hit, you begin to wonder even more about what the Blackhawks will have to do with the 15-year veteran and three-time Stanley Cup winner.
You can’t possibly trade his contract in a pandemic-affected NHL without giving away major future capital, and it’s less and less likely that he’d be intriguing to the expansion Seattle Kraken in any form. Throw in the fact that younger players like Ian Mitchell, Adam Boqvist, and Nicolas Beaudin are taking his job from him game-by-game, and you just don’t know what the future of Seabrook with Chicago holds.