In the world of anatomy according to the National Hockey League, players don't suffer injuries to specific parts of their bodies. The human skeleton, in NHL-speak, is broken down into two parts -- just like our wonderful state: Upper body (peninsula) and lower body (peninsula).
This phenomenon is never more prevalent than during playoff time, and with a handful of regular season games remaining, it's close enough to start qualifying things that hurt by simply indicating which of those two regions have the boo-boo.
The Red Wings are being stricken these days, frustratingly so, with some Upper and Lower peninsula injuries: Robert Lang, Henrik Zetterberg, Pavel Datsyuk, and Mathieu Schneider are all nursing mysterious ailments that are either upper or lower, and even that might be a smoke screen. The theory is, why give your opponents a target at which to aim? Better to have them go lower when you're really hurting top shelf. But sometimes you can't hide the affected area.
Years ago, sometime in the 1990's, before the Red Wings began winning Stanley Cups again, Sergei Fedorov had something the matter with his shoulder as the team headed into the playoffs. Sergei wasn't convinced, necessarily, that he could muster the intestinal fortitude to play with such a disturbance. His teammates weren't all that convinced, either. So one of them -- I can't recall who it was -- took Fedorov, who was wearing some sort of protective contraption under his sweater, onto the ice after practice and started checking him into the boards, trying to assure him that it was okay to give it a try during a game. The reactions of people like Ted Lindsay, Gordie Howe, and Bill Gadsby were, unfortunately, not preserved for posterity.
The Red Wings, already in smoke screen mode, naturally insist that the upper and lower parts of their injured players aren't anything to truly worry about. The bumps and bruises are being shrugged off as minor annoyances and little more. Which, of course, in the NHL could mean that someone's about to have their right leg amputated. Or not.
In the old days, NHL teams would actually tell the conveniently-leaky press that a perfectly healthy player was the one hurting, keeping the real injured player unnamed and thus safe from nefarious opposing players with bad intentions. But the league eventually put an end to that, though their rules about reporting injuries are still sort of winked at -- hence the "upper" and "lower" designations.
After Steve Yzerman got smashed in the face with a puck in Game 5 of the conference semifinals against Calgary in 2004, I wonder if anyone with the team had the thought of describing Yzerman's injury as that of the "upper body." Or lower.
This is the NHL, after all -- the league of regionalized injuries and diversionary tactics.
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