DENVER — Erik Johnson is back in the Colorado Avalanche lineup and feeling better than ever.
That hasn’t always been the case and at one point it may have even seemed unlikely that he’d even be in this spot.
Let’s back up a little bit.
In early February, ESPN’s The Point dropped a video in which Emily Kaplan interviews Johnson. He discussed a range of topics, but the one thing that stood out was the 35-year-old Minnesotan mentioning that, in the depths of his struggle to return from a concussion suffered during the 2021-22 season, he considered calling it quits.
That notion, along with how he decides which player gets a horse named after them, had my mind abuzz with questions. And before I could ask them…
Snap!
That’s presumably the sound, or feeling, Johnson’s ankle made when it broke on Feb. 11 after the rear guard blocked a shot in the midst of Colorado’s 5-3 victory over the Florida Panthers. Johnson missed 19 games while recovering, and wasn’t around or available to answer my questions.
When he returned to the lineup on March 24, I was there and ready.
So just how close did E.J. come to retiring?
“Not close at all. No,” Johnson said with a chuckle. “I still want to play a few more years. I feel really good and my body has felt better than it has in a long time. So never for a second did it even enter my mind.”
I’m sure winning the Stanley Cup certainly helps color everything that happened last year in a rosier hue, but hockey doesn’t get easier with age. Some players, looking at the seemingly insurmountable mountain of offseason workouts and on-ice skates needed to be ready at the start of training camp, simply decide that they can’t do it anymore.
And when a guy has gone through multiple seasons of injuries, the way Johnson had, it would be easy to have doubts about the sturdiness of your body or your motivation to return only to go through those peaks and valleys again.
For Johnson, how he approaches the offseason and a recovery period have both matured along with him.
“There’s a lot more tools and a lot of things behind the scenes that guys are doing that most people probably don’t know about. Legal things of course,” Johnson explained. “There’s so many treatment options from different types of chiropractors and massage and saunas, cold tubs. I think guys are using everything to their advantage nowadays, more so than even 10 years ago — just nutrition and all that. So I’ve really tried to up my game in that sense with doing everything I can off the ice to make sure my body’s feeling good.
“So far it’s great because this year I’ve felt physically better than I have in probably five years.”
That kind of effort and commitment, the ownership over the rehab experience, isn’t necessarily new to the sport, but it’s somewhat new to the players in Colorado. Fans have seen Avs captain Gabriel Landeskog leave town to heal and start working his way back before returning to the team to begin training and reintegrating into the program. Some players have even sought additional medical advice from elsewhere.
“I think that’s huge with all of our guys. I feel like we’ve been a committed team to the training, the rehab, all the things we have to do,” Colorado coach Jared Bednar said at the time of Johnson’s return. “Some guys go outside the organization even to get second and third opinions, and then get a mix of what they want to do for the rehab. Our medical staff’s open to all that. Whatever we can do to help the player, that they find beneficial, then we’re going to do it.”
For Johnson specifically, this latest injury was merely about the time needed to heal. It appears that whatever in the ankle broke, it was in a good enough state to heal quickly. He had an initial timetable of eight weeks but returned in six, making him perhaps the only member of the Avalanche this season to return from an injury on time or early and remain healthy with no resurgence of the original ailment.
Certainly, not all injuries are equal.
“I think with this one it was a little bit more cut and dry because it’s a fracture, and when the fracture is ready, then you’re good to go,” Bednar said. “We kind of had the early indication with EJ, just because of the minimal swelling, the way he was getting around even like four or five days after he hurt it, he was looking good and feeling pretty good. So that was a good early indication that hopefully he’d be able to come back early.”
With Johnson in his natural spot and bolstering a back end that’s nearly complete — obviously minus the presence of middle-pair defenseman Josh Manson — it was time to ask the real hard-hitting question.
What does a guy like Devon Toews have to do to get a horse named after him? Or more specifically, what is theJohnson criteria for teammate horse-naming?
“Ones that are kind of memorable. Memorable names, and then ones that will get approved. Because some like Mikko, I tried to name one Mikko but that was taken,” Johnson revealed. “There’s a database of names. Like O’Connor? Taken. So names like that. We’ll see. I don’t have any in the pipeline right now that need names. They just kind of come to me. Sometimes I’ll name them after a teammate, sometimes I won’t. It just depends.
“[I] try and implement stuff like that and grow the Avalanche brand, I guess, and [that of] some of my teammates. So that’s fun.”
