As the Flyers hit the home stretch of their slate of preseason games, ready to turn the page into the regular season, so too does Tyson Foerster seem ready to turn the page into a more normal situation. That is, after all of the dramatics that circled around him over the summer, all of the uncertainty, he’s officially a full participant in the preseason for the Flyers, as he’s set to get in for his first game this evening up in Boston.
As we recall, things blew up around him in a big way back on July 1, and while it was initially reported that Foerster had suffered an offseason injury so severe it could hold him out for the first three months of the season, the Flyers were able to shed some light on his true situation soon after the report came out.
“He had an injury at the World Championships that wasn’t supposed to be anything really serious,” Flyers General Manager Danny Briere explained to media later that day. “Came back here and there was some infection that set in to the elbow, and then it just got worse. So he came and saw our doctors and decided they had to go in and remove the infection. What I’m finding out is it takes a long time for all the samples to come back negative, and that’s what we’re still waiting on. At that point, we’ll reevaluate and see if more needs to be done or if we’re lucky enough that’s the end of it and he can move on and be ready for the start of the season. But there’s no guarantee of that. We’re sitting and waiting right now to see how serious it is or not.”
So it’s been something of a slow and uncertain recovery process, but not nearly as slow as many might have feared. And since Foerster first got in for a full practice last Tuesday, finally shedding the non-contact jersey he was skating in, ramping up in the practices and getting a little more intense and physical therein, the team has final deemed him ready to take the next step into a game.
This is the next bit of easing back into things, but he’ll still get a significant, if familiar role in this first game back, as he looks to be skating on a line again with old linemates Bobby Brink and Noah Cates. And whether this runway — however many games he’s given in this final stretch of three in the preseason — will have him ready enough to go on opening night, we’ll see, but this is undoubtedly good news for his situation, and a crisis seems to have been well and truly averted.
