Canucks’ Filip Chytil Out Indefinitely With Facial Fracture

Canucks center Filip Chytil sustained a facial fracture in Wednesday’s practice and will be out indefinitely, Jeff Paterson of Rink Wide: Vancouver reports.

Considering Chytil’s long history of concussions, a simple fracture is far from the worst-case scenario after he was dazed by taking a puck to the face in the session. The 26-year-old has only been good for 12 appearances this season, missing three months early in the season with an upper-body injury that was suspected to be at least his third concussion in the last three years. He returned for a six-game stretch before the Olympic break, before sitting out of Vancouver’s last contest with migraine headaches.

Concussions and facial injuries have now limited Chytil to less than a full season’s worth of games over the past three years. He’s only played in 78 of 221 possible regular-season games, equal to 35.3%, since the beginning of the 2023-24 campaign. That window of inavailability came just after the Czech center finally seemed to break through into a top-nine role with the Rangers, rattling off a career-high 22 goals and 45 points in 74 games in the 2022-23 campaign.

That type of production might just be too far gone for Chytil to get back to that level, though. Acquired from New York in last year’s J.T. Miller trade, he’s suited up 27 times for Vancouver in the last 13 months with five goals and four assists for nine points with a -18 rating. That’s a 15-goal, 27-point pace over 82 games – closer to fourth-line production than the second-line role behind Elias Pettersson they were initially hoping he could fill.

There’s little left to play for in Vancouver. They’re already 21 points back of the playoff cutoff in the West and are in a seven-point hole for last place in the league. While not mathematically eliminated from playoff contention, they’re a non-factor by all intents and purposes. That means the stretch run is exclusively about trying to get individual talents back on the right track – including Chytil – but whether he’ll heal enough to get back in the lineup before mid-April now remains to be seen.