Nick Suzuki Injury Ends Ironman Streak, Habs Still Win

The Nick Suzuki injury has ended one of the most impressive quiet streaks in hockey. The Montreal Canadiens captain will miss two to four weeks with what the team calls an upper-body injury, according to the Associated Press via NBC Sports. His run of five hundred forty-six straight regular-season games, the second-longest active streak in the NHL, is over.

How the Nick Suzuki injury happened

It started on Tuesday night against the San Jose Sharks. With just over five minutes left in the third period and the game tied at three, a shot from Sharks defenseman Michael Kesselring struck Suzuki on the left hand. He finished the game, which Montreal lost four to three in overtime, but the Canadiens announced his absence on Thursday without giving any more detail.

The timing of the Nick Suzuki injury stings. Suzuki had scored a goal and added an assist against San Jose, and he leads the team with twelve points in nine games, built from five goals and seven assists. He is twenty-seven years old and put up one hundred and one points last season, so the Canadiens are losing their top scorer and their first-line center in one move.

Not everyone thinks the story ends at one sore hand. Reporter Renaud Lavoie said on TVA Sports that Suzuki was already playing at less than full strength before the shot, according to Marqueur. The team has not confirmed that, so treat it as a report rather than a fact.

Why the streak mattered

Staying healthy for five hundred forty-six games is wild in a league with this much travel and contact. Suzuki's run dated back to his debut in 2019 and ranked twentieth in league history. Only Colorado's Brent Burns, at one thousand seventeen consecutive games, has a longer active streak.

The Canadiens franchise record belongs to Doug Jarvis, who played five hundred sixty straight games in a Montreal uniform between 1975 and 1982. Suzuki was only fourteen games short of that mark. Jarvis was finishing a long hiking trip in Portugal when he heard the news, and he told NHL.com that Suzuki seems like "the epitome of a team player."

Jarvis also said the injury must hurt emotionally as much as physically, because the captain simply wants to be in the lineup helping his teammates. His message to Suzuki was simple: get healthy and start another streak. The next active Canadiens run belongs to defenseman Lane Hutson at one hundred seventy-five games.

Montreal answers on night one

The first game without their captain could have gone badly. Instead, Montreal beat the Chicago Blackhawks four to one on Friday night at the United Center. Winger Cole Caufield had warned beforehand that "everybody has to step up," and a depth player did exactly that.

Fourth-line center Jake Evans scored his first two goals of the season, one of them shorthanded, and added an assist, according to the Montreal Gazette. Evans finished plus four in just over seventeen minutes and helped a penalty kill that stopped all five Chicago power plays.

Kaiden Guhle scored his first of the season after missing the first four games, and Mike Matheson added an empty-net goal in his first game back from injury. Rookie goalie Jacob Fowler made twenty saves and has now won four straight starts. Oliver Kapanen moved into the top-line center spot and won eleven of eighteen faceoffs.

What the Habs face next

The win does not erase the problem, because a Nick Suzuki injury of this length covers a lot of games. The Canadiens were already without forward Ivan Demidov, who has been out with a lower-body injury since early October, and goalie Samuel Montembeault is also hurt. Montreal sits at five wins, three regulation losses and two overtime losses, and the team has struggled to hold leads this season.

The schedule does not get easier. Montreal now starts a four-game road trip, and the next stop is the Heritage Classic against the Winnipeg Jets on Sunday at Princess Auto Stadium, where the forecast calls for a high of four degrees Celsius. The Jets just traded goalie Connor Hellebuyck to the New Jersey Devils, so both teams arrive with plenty of storylines.

For hockey fans, the real question after the Nick Suzuki injury is whether this scoring-by-committee approach can last. The Canadiens hope Suzuki is back before American Thanksgiving, and his streak will restart at one. Until then, depth players like Evans, Kapanen and Beck get a bigger stage, and the early read is that the room is ready for it.

The Nick Suzuki injury also sets up a busy month for the front office. If you follow the team, keep an eye on the centre position all month, since TSN has already asked whether the injury will push Montreal toward a trade for depth. More on Montreal's season and the rest of the league is on the Canada page.