Hall Is a Playoff Player. Treat the Injury That Way.

Whatever “doesn’t look good” turns out to mean, the right move with Taylor Hall is the slow one. Don’t rush him. October games are not what he’s here for.

Look at what Hall actually did for this team. Five points in seven games this season, which is nice. Nineteen points in nineteen playoff games last spring, which is the reason there’s a banner going up. That’s the job. He was brought in as a reclamation, a guy who’d been passed around and labeled as past it, and the organization figured out that what he had left was exactly enough for the two months that matter. Not an 82-game workhorse. A closer.

So when he goes down in the second period against Washington after taking one high along the boards, the instinct is to panic about depth. The better instinct is to look at the calendar. It’s October 14. The playoffs start in April. There is no version of the next six weeks where Hall’s presence decides anything, and there is a version of May where it decides everything. You don’t spend a 34-year-old’s shoulder on a road trip through Winnipeg and Calgary.

This is where the structure does what it’s built to do. Hall was on the third line with Stankoven and Blake, which is the easiest line in the lineup to plug into. Two guys who forecheck, two guys who don’t need a passenger to carry the puck. That’s the line you hand to Nadeau or Unger Sorum, and if either of them sticks, the organization has one more cheap body for next year and Hall comes back to a deeper team than he left.

Brind’Amour isn’t going to say any of this out loud. He’ll say week-to-week, he’ll say we’ll see, and he’ll say the guys who are here need to step up. That’s the right thing to say. But the quiet calculation in that room has to be that Hall’s season is measured in May, and anything he gives before that is a bonus.

The team that just won a Cup is 6-1-1 with three regulars out. It can afford patience. The thing it can’t afford is Hall at 80 percent in the second round because somebody got nervous in November.

Let him heal. He’ll be there when it counts, because that’s what he was brought here to be.