Florida Panthers captain Aleksander Barkov will play in the World Championship for Finland, despite missing the entire NHL season recovering from surgery on a torn ACL and MCL in his right knee.
He received full medical clearance from Panthers doctors at his end-of-season checkup on Wednesday.
Barkov said he’s looking forward to next month’s tournament because he’s ready to play hockey again, but always thought he’d have a chance to play for the Panthers this season despite his initial diagnosis.
“I never took it as that I will not play this season,” Barkov told ESPN. “I was always told that there’s a good chance if everything goes well, you can play this season at least in the playoffs, maybe even before that. Of course, the timeline was seven to nine months, but there have been guys who have came back earlier and never had any issues with that. So that helped me a lot mentally that I can come back even quicker than that.”
That mindset helped carry him through the early stages of recovery, which began almost immediately after surgery.
“It was almost right away that I started to feel the progress,” Barkov said. “I could lift my leg, I could walk without the crutches and I could live normal life. That was crucial.”
Barkov began skating in January and had initially targeted a late March return. But the Panthers had fallen out of the playoff race by then, and he changed his training accordingly.
The back-to-back Stanley Cup champions missed the playoffs after an injury-plagued season in which they lost nearly 500 man games lost to injury. The biggest loss was Barkov, their top shutdown center.
“We just got another lesson that how hard it is to win every single at night in this league,” Barkov said. “Every single night is you go to battle and you need to play at highest level possible and do the right things every single time you step on the ice to get a chance to win that game and you need to do it over and over again… There’s a lot of positives in this year too, but of course we didn’t get to our goal. That was our goal to make playoffs, so we’re not happy with that.”
Barkov said one of the most difficult parts of the season for him was missing out on the Olympics for Team Finland.
“I knew I was going to miss Olympics, but then a week or two before when everyone started already wearing Olympic gear and talking about Olympics, that was very, very hard for me those couple of weeks,” Barkov said.
“Olympics has always been my dream. And I’m lucky I got to be in one of those 12 years ago, but that was my dream. And seeing the opening ceremony and all the athletes walking on the field and thinking about how much I wanted to be there, that was really hard for me.”
Barkov hopes to be close to his full self for Finland, where he will be joined by Panthers teammate Anton Lundell.
“I’m just very excited to get back to playing hockey,” he said. “Really looking forward to that first game.”
The Ice Hockey World Championship begins May 15 and runs through May 31.
