Lighthouse Hockey, a New York Islanders community

Islanders fans are all too familiar with hip surgery, with Rick DiPietro, Mike Sillinger and Mike Comrie all going under the knife last year and none returning to 100%. Are hip injuries increasing across sports? Is it related to training focused on strengthening the knees? Or is it a matter of better diagnosis, allowing docs to "fix" problems that otherwise would have been played through and/or rested? The New York Times takes it for a spin, in one of those "experts are talking, but data is incomplete" stories. One doc in the story: "I get 40 hockey players in a six-week period at the end of the season all coming into my office with the same-looking bone structure in their hips, all saying that they have been skating since they were 3 years old."

Well, that makes tonight more interesting. Streit returns after just three games out, but Bergenheim hasn't played since March 10 - 11 games missed with his more severe groin pull. Logan also says Gordon will go with Joensuu and the two-enforcer lineup, to ease the call-up burden on Bridgeport.

Maybe it will take a bigger name for NHL insurers to start adding "no pre-game soccer" to their policies, but this can't help. Kurtis McLean was a nice story -- a NCAA D-III product debuting in the NHL at age 28 and scoring a big goal in his second game. He got two more games in March before this season-ending accident happened in the warmup that has become so common among many NHL teams. Don't know what this will mean for his hockey career, but the hill toward the NHL just got incredibly steeper.