A full month later than his original target date, Stamkos looks back on how much pressure he felt in trying to keep to his overly-optimistic return date from a broken tibia and realized that he was the only person applying the pressure...
...wanting so badly to play for his homeland Canada in the Sochi Olympics consumed him and motivated him, but in the end the broken bone dictated that he stay home.
"I think now it was kind of a relief for that whole thing to be over and done with," Stamkos said of trying to get back in time for the Olympics. "Just to get all that stuff out of the way and to focus on one thing and that's getting back and playing for Tampa."
Which he will do, as Stamkos is now eyeing a March 6th return date, the Lightning's first game back from a four-game road trip that starts Thursday night in Nashville - a road trip in which he will not be accompanying his teammates on as he sticks to his daily routine to make this more reasonable target date.
"It did feel good (Feb. 5), but it feels even better now," Stamkos offered. "Maybe I wasn't as far along as I thought, knowing how much better it has felt now that I have kept working on it and taking a couple of days off. It's just going to continually get better and that's positive knowing it's doing that."
Tampa Bay bench boss Jon Cooper knows all to well what was going through Stamkos' brain as the original target date approached, a date that would have had him back in the lineup in time to get a couple of games worth of ice time in before taking off for Russia - Cooper wasn't buying it but tried to be supportive of his efforts.
"I think if you were to ask him if he could play right now he would definitely say he could," Cooper said on Tuesday. "There were a lot of times (before the Olympic break) he said he was OK but you could tell he was feeling the effects of some pain. I don't see that anymore. Time is healing the wound."
The final hurdle for Stamkos is a meeting with his team of physicians on March 5th, where they will review the latest set of xrays and hopefully give him a clean bill of health.
http://www.sportsinjuryalert.com/2014/02/bolts-steven-stamkos-sets-march-6th.html
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