It’s a headline that has come up far too often for such a young player: Dallas Stars forward Brett Ritchie is out with an injury. This time, the 24-year-old power forward has suffered an undisclosed upper body injury and the team has already announced that he has been sent home to Dallas early from the current road trip for further evaluation.
While Ritchie is only considered day-to-day for now, any instance of injury concern regarding the young scorer comes with more than its fair share of concern. Since his first career call-up midway through the 2014-15 season, Ritchie has missed 40 games, just at the NHL level, from a variety of different injuries. The most well-known is of-course the wrist injury suffered prior to the 2015-16 season that kept Ritchie on the injured reserve for the team’s first 27 games and with the AHL’s Texas Stars for all but eight of the remaining contests, as he worked his way back to fill strength. Additionally, Ritchie has struggled to finish a season, missing the final six regular season games and first two postseason games for Dallas in 2015-16 and again missing the final two games last season. The worst part may be that Ritchie’s absences have all been the result of different injuries, indicating that he may just be a fragile player. For a power forward who plays a physical game and lives in the crease, that is problematic for the young winger’s future.
For now, there is no reason to believe that this current injury should keep Ritchie sidelined for any extended period of time. Instead, it may well just be chalked up as yet another occurrence of minor injury. At 7-5 through 12 games, the season has not gotten off to a terrible start for the Stars, but after “winning the off-season” expectations are high. The team would rather have their 6’3″, 217-lb. net front presence who showed 20-goal potential in 2016-17 in as many games as possible in 2017-18.