By: Ryan Dadoun

In case you missed it, Marian Gaborik is day-to-day with a knee injury. That's not groundbreaking news, but what made it an interesting story in my mind was Tortorella and the New York Rangers' initial refusal to explain the nature of the injury. Although the Rangers were quick to point out that Gaborik's current injury had nothing to do with any of his priors, Tortorella refused to even specify if it was a lower, mid, or upper-body injury at first. That only added an air of mystery to what could have been a relatively standard story. Especially with a player like Gaborik where your natural tendency is to worry about the worst case scenario whenever you hear that he's hurt.

It's come out now that it's a knee injury, although the team is officially referring to it as a lower-body injury, but that just makes me wonder why they covered it up in the first place. Was it a privacy thing? Is Gaborik ashamed that his knee specifically is injured and he didn't want that to get out? It sounds silly, but when the team doesn't get the information out there, the fans are left to fill in the blanks. The only possibilities that make sense to me is either the Rangers feared or still fear it's a much bigger injury than they're letting on or they didn't know exactly what the injury was at first. The second possibility seems unlikely seeing because Gaborik knew enough off the bat to rule out a hip, groin, or torso injury. Maybe he didn't know exactly what was wrong right away, but they could have come up with a basic explanation of what's bothering him and why they were sure it wasn't related to his previous injuries. If the first possibility turns out to be true, that this is much more than a day-to-day injury, then the Tortorella and the Rangers will just lose credibility later on, especially with regards to Gaborik.

Withholding information regarding an injury isn't anything new and it's not unique to the Rangers organization. However, in my humble opinion, it rarely proves to be helpful from a PR perspective and it leads to people assuming the worst.