![]() ![]() “We thought it was going to be, ‘OK, he can really skate, he can defend, he’s competitive, let’s see where his offense goes in college.’ That was what we projected,” Bergeron said. When then-head coach Chris Bergeron brushed up on him, he came away with similar impressions, earning Walker an invite to Bowling Green’s campus. Schutte had fallen in love with Walker’s skating ability and physical presence, and had told the rest of Bowling Green’s staff that he was a standout in the league. After the showcase, Bowling Green assistant coach Barry Schutte, who’d watched him play while scouting Dermott, introduced himself. “I could see the other guys around the league that were getting scholarships and I thought if I didn’t get one that year that I would potentially have the opportunity the next year,” he said.īut it wasn’t until the league’s all-star showcase that year that a college program showed any interest in him. With the Hurricanes, playing on a team with future Maple Leafs second-rounder Travis Dermott, hockey as part of his future came back into focus again. It was an easy travel to the rink every day,” he said, laughing.Īt 18, he then made the nearest Jr. ![]() C Georgina Ice down the road from Keswick as he finished up Grade 12, posting 18 points in 45 games. But when his OHL Draft day arrived in the spring of 2010 and nine of his Express teammates were selected, he passed through all 301 picks.Īt 16, while his Express teammates of a year earlier were playing in the OHL, Walker decided to take a step back and play AA.Īt 17, while his peers were playing out their NHL Draft years, he began his season playing for the Jr. Walker will tell you that at 15, he was just “half-decent.” He was born and raised in Keswick, Ont., about an hour north of Toronto, and played AAA hockey for the area’s top team, the York Simcoe Express. Instead, he’s looking back on a different gruesome injury from a season earlier, when a Matt Dumba slapshot rose and struck him in the face, leaving blood gushing in a trail across the ice as he rushed to the bench. He has no idea that he’s four days away from his season being over. Louis for a two-game set against the Blues. It’s the third Thursday in October and the Kings are in town to play the Stars before heading to St. ![]() Two hundred and nine days before that phone call from his car in Los Angeles, Walker is on another call from a hotel room in Dallas, mapping out his winding road to the NHL. And just as he did, beating improbable odds at several stops along his route to the NHL, circumstances beyond his control just seemed to keep getting in his way. Walker was never even supposed to make it here. Though this is the worst injury the 27-year-old defenceman says he has suffered in his career, it’s just another chapter in one of the NHL’s most unlikely success stories. Torn ACLs can be rehabbed in six months in a best-case scenario but he has been told that eight months is a more realistic target, so he has set his sights on getting ready for the 2022-23 season. A return to the Kings has been ruled out for this season. He’s still not back on the ice but doctors have circled a couple of weeks from now as a possibility for getting onto skates again. After not doing any of those things - things that once felt so small - for months, they feel huge to him now. Just this week, he got on the anti-gravity treadmill to begin running on 75 percent of his body weight. That has turned, in the last couple of months, to building his strength up again. In the early days, all he could do was work to get his range of motion back. Progress has been slow and earned but every milestone motivates him for the next. Though he has no obligations on Saturdays, he has turned those into a light workout day of his choice as well. A cardio session is almost daily at this point, too. lifts on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. at the rehab center attached to the Kings’ practice facility. His Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays all start at 8 a.m. Now his Kings are beyond the 70-game mark and as his teammates work to secure a playoff spot, rehab days like these have become the norm for Walker. When Kings athletic trainer Chris Kingsley reached him and Walker explained the feeling, Kingsley knew right away that he’d torn his ACL (though he didn’t say it in the moment). At the time, he wasn’t sure how bad it was, but he knew it was best he stay on the ice. They both went down, Walker’s right knee bent awkwardly in the wrong direction, and he heard a pop and rolled to his side to instinctively grab his shin pad. When the puck dropped and pushed to his side of the dot, he and Perron pursued it and got tangled up in one another. The Kings defenseman was lined up at the right circle in the defensive zone opposite David Perron in a late-October game against the St. ![]() He still re-lives the moment in his head. Yesterday, he passed the five-month mark since he blew out his ACL. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |