Canada's John Tavares out of Sochi Games with knee injury; Isles to evaluate

And another one bites the dust.

No, Freddie Mercury isn't going to come crawling out of the ground to reprise Queen's rock classic, but when New York Islanders' captain John Tavares limped off the ice in the second period of Team Canada's narrow victory over Latvia on Wednesday in Sochi, it was just one more nail for Gary Bettman to drive into the coffin of the NHL's participation in future Olympic games.

The thing about Olympic games is that only the best and the brightest of athletes are chosen to participate, so any player that gets injured has serious repercussions for the NHL team that he plays for - and when you add Tavares' knee to the list of NHL stars who have gone down with injury in these games, Bettman has a pretty compelling case to nail that coffin shut.

And he won't have any trouble at all convincing the owners of the individual franchises, particularly those who now have players on the shelf due to injuries suffered in Russia.

The Islanders captain John Tavares suffered the injury taking a clean hip check from Latvia defenseman Arturs Kulda along the dashers low in the Canadian attacking zone while attempting to make a play on the puck, his left knee appearing to take the brunt of the impact.


Tavares went down immediately and slid along the dashers to the back boards, writhing in pain and the puck underneath him - play was stopped at once and Tavares was helped to the bench where he looked to be in obvious pain, then taken back to the room for evaluation.

"He's out for the tournament," coach Mike Babcock said. "He'll be re-examined by the New York Islanders people and I'm sure they'll have an announcement."

The Islanders hit the Olympic break as cold as any of the venues in Sochi, winners of just one of their last eight games, struggling to find any offensive rhythm at all - and if Tavares is out for any length of time they can forget about making any sort of run to get back into the playoff race despite their less than imposing schedule.

Tavares ranks third in the NHL in points with 66, his 24 goals and 42 helpers tops on the Islanders who are bringing up the rear in the Metropolitan Division with a paltry 52 points, a full 14 points behind current Eastern Conference eighth seed Detroit with 22 games to play.

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