Here in a nutshell is what we learned from the Dan Boyle broken foot revelation:
Every time a player turns in a bad game (and Boyle turned in a number of them before healing up and speeding up the last week), we now must include in his critique the phrase. . . unless hes hiding an injury poorly.
In this case, Boyle was doing just that, and we can only assume that he was doing so with the express permission of head coach Todd McLellan because the Sharks needed 70 percent of Boyle more than they needed 100 percent of any of their extra defensemen.
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Hockey is like that -- injured is a binary state. If youre playing, youre not hurt. If youre not playing, youre hurt. Boyle was by this definition not hurt, but he was playing poorly by all analyses, including his own.
KURZ: Boyle played through broken foot
Of course, Boyle flogs himself for his sins the way most 12th century clerics did, so he didnt really take as much abuse as he might have if he had tried to deny the evidence. He went out game after game, performed intermittently, and was becoming a surreptitious target for the suddenly emboldened Sharks fans who have finally learned that Boooooo is just another way of saying, I love you but you just took out half the garage.
Suddenly, his foot is better -- allegedly -- he has a point in each of his last four games, and he seems more like the 30-year-old Boyle rather than the 35-year-old Boyle. Lesson learned. Sometimes when a guy is playing badly, it isnt because hes a bad player. Some of the time it is, of course, but sometimes he has a note from his doctor that you dont get to see until much later.
So thats the new rule: So-and-so stunk out the joint tonight, unless he is playing with an undisclosed injury, in which case he was only half stinking.
That is, until we get tired of typing those 16 words in every other paragraph.