The concern is less so that this is a one-time injury that and that the team needs to overcome not having him for 1/4, 1/2, all of the regular season…
But that there seems to be a pattern to these injuries that suggests there is something fundamentally wrong with the mechanics of Demko’s body that will cause these injuries to repeatedly occur.
His workload was managed last year far more than ever with DeSmith and his body still let him down in the stretch and then again in the playoffs.
The concern is more so that even if he rested all regular season and then came back for the playoffs that he would still be just as prone to injury as he was before and not be available for the most important games.
imo the team is good enough that a replacement level guy (ie. forsberg, or any of the guys vector mentioned) should be fine to float the team for half of the regular season. of course, things could go completely sideways and they could have a seattle 2023 / njd 2024 situation where awful goaltending in the face of an otherwise good team blows up the season, but that's a risk (to some degree)
with demko. goalies are fickle like that.
the other side of which is that silovs, short sample or not, almost won two rounds for us.
i was fully on board for trading demko for a stud young rhd (bouchard was my pick) two years ago with the fear that we john gibson him. obviously, the canucks have had a very different trajectory than the ducks for the last half decade of gibson trade speculation, but if some gm is willing to take the flyer on demko getting healthy, we should still explore that route. replacement goalies don't cost much, and as much as this is used as a dumb crutch in arguments, we have ian clark.