After injury-riddled season, Penguins’ Jason Zucker strives for health in 2022-23

Jason Zucker wasn’t being anti-social. He wasn’t suggesting he was special, nor did he think his teammates smelled badly.

But during the home games of the Pittsburgh Penguins’ first-round playoff series earlier this month, Zucker sat apart from the rest of the team, near the tunnel to the locker room on an elevated stool.

“Just trying to stay comfortable,” Zucker said.

But this wasn’t your La-Z-Boy, recliner-style “comfort.” It was just so that Zucker’s ailing body could best be left in a position it allowed him to play.

It was a fitting end for Zucker to the season in which injuries again and again were an all-too-prominent storyline.

“It was important for me to come back and just help the team any way I could,” Zucker said of a return to the lineup for Games 3-7 of the Penguins’ series loss to the New York Rangers. “Obviously, it didn’t end the way we wanted. But for me, I wanted to be on the ice with my team as much as possible and that meant doing whatever I could to get back out there.”

That, in part, involved using the stool. Zucker was loathe to divulge any more of the details of that particular injury that caused him to miss the regular-season finale and first two games of the playoffs, but it’s not a stretch of an assumption to speculate his core and/or lower body were ailing enough so that it was painful to sit down on a traditional bench.

Jason Zucker said it was important to get himself on the team cleared for the playoffs pic.twitter.com/8PmxKLBm0K

— Chris Adamski (@C_AdamskiTrib) May 17, 2022

Zucker missed exactly half of the Penguins’ 82-game regular season because of various maladies (or, perhaps, flare-ups of a past injury).

First, it was an early-January stint on injured reserve that caused him to miss seven games. Zucker returned to the lineup to play in his hometown and had his only two-goal game of the season during a Jan. 17 victory at the Vegas Golden Knights — but he had core-muscle surgery eight days later and wouldn’t play again until March 31.

That return, too, was limited to one game. This time, Zucker came back to play against his former team — the Minnesota Wild — but a hit by former teammate Kevin Fiala sent Zucker awkwardly into the boards.

It looked bad — but Zucker’s absence this time lasted “only” three games. A games-played “streak” of nine games followed until suffering what was termed a lower-body injury during the season’s penultimate game April 25.

“It was one of those things this year that for me I couldn’t stay ahead of it,” Zucker said. “It seemed like it was one thing after another. I’m not going to get into specifics of what that was, but for me it was tough to try and manage it all and get back.

“But for me it was about every time something happens, try to get back as quick as possible to get back on the ice. Nobody likes missing games, and that includes myself.”

When former general manager Jim Rutherford traded a first-round pick for Zucker in February 2020, he probably figured that 27 months later the Penguins would have had more than 94 games out of him by now.

Though the coronavirus pandemic limited the number of available games for Zucker, so have injuries (18 additional games were missed during the 2021 season because of what the team termed a lower-body injury).

To be frank, Rutherford probably expected more than 27 goals (including playoffs) over the past 27 months out of Zucker, too. A speedy four-time 20-goal scorer who had a career-high 33 goals in 2017-18 for the Wild, Zucker had eight goals and nine assists this past season after tallying a similar nine goals and nine assists in 38 games played during the abbreviated 2020-21 NHL season.

At 30 years old, Zucker is entering the final year of a contract that will account for a $5.5 million salary-cap hit in 2022-23.

Popular with his teammates and seemingly well-liked by coach Mike Sullivan, Zucker’s role in the “middle six” of the Penguins’ forward lineup appears very secure.

If, of course, he’s healthy. And Zucker is confident he will be. Another surgery, he said, is being considered.

“You should see the white board they have (at the team facility) to try to figure out some sort of algorithm to keep me on the ice,” Zucker said. “It was a crazy year with that. We truly were grinding every day trying to stay healthy.

“(But) this summer I am not going to change anything. I felt ready and prepared coming into training camp. … I will have to rehab and do some of that stuff but, as far as the training goes, a lot of it will end up staying the same.”

Keep up with the Pittsburgh Penguins all season long.