- Victor Hedman has not played since March 19 and says he is healthy in body and mind
- The Lightning captain stepped away last season to deal with performance anxiety
- Read below for what Hedman told NHL.com about the decision and his 18th season
Victor Hedman is heading into his 18th NHL season with no regrets about the one he walked away from.
The Lightning captain has not played a game since March 19, when he stepped away for personal reasons he later explained were about his mental health. NHL.com’s Dan Rosen asked him this week whether he would make the same call again, and he did not waver.
“I wasn’t myself on the ice. I felt I wasn’t helping the team. So, I felt the best thing for the team was for me to focus on myself away. I don’t regret that decision at all. It was the right thing to do.”
Tampa Bay announced the leave on March 25 and asked for privacy. Here is the statement the team put out that day:
Injuries stacked up long before that. Hedman had a procedure on his elbow in December that cost him 22 games, then hurt himself in warmups before Sweden’s Olympic quarterfinal in Milan and watched that loss to the United States from the bench.
Skating is the part of his game everything else runs through, and the elbow took it. Hedman told Rosen what game days had started to feel like by March.
“For me, it was not really feeling low, but it was performance anxiety, kind of feeling that pressure in your chest as soon as a gameday would hit. It kind of locks you up. You make a mistake and in the past you’d be able to shake it off, but I couldn’t do that.”
Hedman said all of this out loud for the first time at exit interviews on May 5, two days after Tampa Bay lost Game 7 to Montreal in the first round. Watch his full session from that afternoon:
He leaned on a longtime therapist through the break and heard from players around the league, including Linus Ullmark and Steven Stamkos. Hedman keeps talking about it because he thinks the silence is the problem.
“The stigma, I think it’s getting a lot better but it’s still probably there. At the same time, people go through this, and it’s a lot more people than you think. It’s good to be able to put it out there, that it is OK not to be OK.”
His 17 points in 33 games made for the thinnest season of his career. He says the summer went the way it needed to and he feels fresh going into camp.
Most of that roster comes back, the group that won the Hart, the Vezina and the Jack Adams and still lost in the first round for a fourth straight year, with Nikita Kucherov’s next contract hanging over the season. Hedman is not pretending the last four Aprils were fine.
“Losing in the first round for four straight years is not good enough. We’re excited about another season, another opportunity to be better.”
