Backstrom is Back

On Sunday afternoon at Capital One Arena, Nicklas Backstrom will pull a No. 19 Washington Capitals sweater on over his shoulder pads, and he will step onto the ice with his teammates for a regular season game, doing so for the 1,059th time in his NHL career. But it's the first time he has done so this season, and the first time since last May.

Between then and now, Backstrom has worked tirelessly to resume his NHL career following hip resurfacing surgery. How successful that surgery is at prolonging his NHL career remains to be seen, but it's already a victory for Backstrom by one important measure: he is finally pain-free after years of pain and aggravation his left hip has caused him.

"I feel better than I did pre-pandemic," says Backstrom. "Obviously, I'm not going to say too much. But I'm feeling really good, and that's all that matters to me. And I'm excited to get back out there."
Given that Backstrom led the Capitals in scoring in the first season (2020-21) following the pandemic, that's encouraging news.
Whenever an athlete in any sport embarks upon a career in a team or an individual sport, it's understood that the clock is ticking, and that it continues to tick between games, matches, rounds, tournaments and seasons. The career of every athlete is finite and can end at any moment, and many of the best and greatest professional athletes of our time and of previous eras aren't always afforded the privilege of a graceful exit from their game, for a multitude of reasons.
Backstrom is a hockey player from a hockey family. His father Anders had a successful pro career in Sweden, playing for a decade there and being drafted by the New York Rangers in 1980. Older brother Kristoffer played junior level hockey in Sweden and was also briefly a pro, and Backstrom's uncle Anders Huss also had a long and successful pro career in Sweden, and he was a Caps' choice in the 11th round of the 1983 NHL Entry Draft.
Hockey is in Backstrom's blood and he has loved the game for virtually his whole life. A rink in the small town of Valbo, Sweden - where Backstrom began playing as a youth - is named for him; it's called NickBack Arena.
When Backstrom had his day with the Stanley Cup in August of 2018, he took the coveted chalice to a modest house in the Swedish countryside and posed for photos of himself proudly holding the Cup aloft while standing on an unpaved road. Behind him was a small field where a few black sheep grazed on the wet grass on this rainy Sunday. This field - just a few hundred feet from the Backstrom family's former home - is where Nicklas Backstrom took his first skated strides as a toddler, more than three decades ago.
In recent seasons, those strides have become labored and painful; the once graceful glide has been marked by a noticeable and punctuational hitch.
For the better part of a decade now, Backstrom has been battling a left hip ailment. Following the 2014-15 season, Backstrom had his first surgery on the hip, and he spent the next four and a half months rehabbing it. Backstrom missed the first three games of the 2015-16 season at the tail end of that rehab, but once he returned to the ice, he was his usual consistent self, the Caps' franchise center, a durable rock in the middle of Washington's top six, as he has been for more than a decade and a half now.

As the years wore on, though, the hip problem flared up again and it became more problematic, more painful and more omnipresent than even Backstrom's unrelenting stoicism was able to ward off.
Months of rest and rehab ahead of the 2021-22 season had no discernible positive effect, and the pain was pervasive, every stride - on and off the ice - bringing discomfort and occasionally eliciting a grimace. Even in the midst of that persistent misery, Backstrom played through it. He missed some time because of COVID and another illness, but he played in 47 of the team's last 54 games after missing each of the first 28.
It was clear that Backstrom wasn't quite the same player, and it was all related to his impaired mobility. Even worse was the constant pain. It was last spring when he began to consider the hip resurfacing surgery, as a last resort to continuing his playing career. He did the homework, and he made the decision.
"I talked to Andy Murray, the tennis player," says Backstrom. "I talked to Isaiah Thomas, the basketball player. I talked to another [former pro hockey player], Johannes Salmonsson in Sweden. He has done both [hips] and he's still playing, and he's feeling unbelievable. And I even talked to Stefan Kronwall - he played [with the Caps] - and he retired, but all of them were very positive and gave me great feedback for why I actually made the decision of doing it."

Backstrom had the surgery late last spring and began a second straight summer and fall of grueling rehab and workouts, months of grinding and pushing, behind the scenes and off the ice.
The history of hip resurfacing surgery among pro hockey players is sparse and not very successful; Anaheim's Ryan Kesler underwent surgery in June of 2017 and missed the first half of the following season. He played a season and half and wasn't the player he once was, so he underwent hip resurfacing in May of 2019, but hasn't played since.
Former NHL defenseman Ed Jovanovski - the first overall pick in the 1994 NHL Entry Draft - underwent hip resurfacing surgery following the 2012-13 NHL season, and he played in just 37 more games in the NHL, all in 2013-14, at the age of 37 with Florida.
"When people heard about my surgery, I've heard from a lot of people," says Backstrom, who turned 35 in November. "And basically, everyone called it for me and said, 'This is it.' But that was good for me, because then I can prove them wrong. And I'm not going to sit here and say anything before I get back, but that's what's been driving me personally. And I love playing hockey. I love playing in front of our home fans. I miss being out there with boys. So that's what's driving me, too."
For the second straight summer and into fall, Backstrom worked his way back while his teammates prepared for the season ahead and took part in training camp. He gradually began to work in some light skating sessions, and was pleased at his freedom of movement, and especially his lack of pain.
"If you look at these last two years," he says, "the difference this year from last year was that this year I was more optimistic about it because I felt better right after the surgery. I could start moving better right away. When I stepped on the ice after four months, I was like, 'Yeah, this is different. This is no pain, nothing. I can just work on my own pace and make sure I get better every day.'
"Something that I've noticed is that when you're pain-free, It's how much more positive you are about the outcome and the process. And in the gym, I've had a different mindset this rehab than maybe last year. I was a little uncertain last year. I was kind of like, 'I don't know if this is going to go,' but I'm pretty optimistic about this one."

As the buzz began to build over his impending return, that optimism has spread to some of his teammates, especially those who have shared in and commiserated during some of Backstrom's rehab rigors. Caps right wing Tom Wilson will also make his season's debut on Sunday against Columbus after undergoing knee surgery last May. The two longtime teammates became rehab partners over the last seven months.
"Nicky is just a hockey player through and through; he loves the game," says Wilson. "He loves being around it, he loves watching it. And he knows what it takes. His motivation is he wants to go out and play, and to come back on his own terms and be the player he can be. And a lot of people don't realize he had a lot of pain in the last couple of years. He hasn't been playing, and he hasn't been having a lot of fun on the ice because he's been grinding through some things. So I'm really excited for him to hopefully get back, get healthy, play how he can play, and it's a lot of fun when you see that happen. It's something really special, so I'm excited to see all that."
Twice in the first half of the 2022-23 season, Caps right wing T.J. Oshie also found himself on the sidelines and working his way back into the lineup, and he also spent time doing the same in the first third of last season.

"There's even moments in my own game when you get older and you start to think of how's it going to play out," says Oshie. "And you wonder, how is your career going to finish? Are you maybe going to bounce around for a couple years? Are you going to get traded a lot? Are you going to get hurt and not be able to come back, and think, 'Oh, I wish I would have done something,' whether it's surgery or other things?

"It's inspiring for a player of Nick's caliber to put so much effort, and I'm telling you I've never seen anyone work as hard as Nick is working these last two seasons to get back in the lineup. And he's not a rah-rah, gym kind of guy. He's a hockey player. He loves playing the game of hockey. But he's in there, and he's working. He's working when we go on the ice [for practice] and when I get to the rink, and when I'm leaving, he's still going. He's still in there. And Tom has jumped on that bandwagon this season with him.
"It will definitely be nice to see that future Hall of Famer get back out there on the ice. And it just really shows how much he loves the game, and how much he loves this organization and being teammates with the guys in here, and pushing for another Stanley Cup."
Backstrom has won a Stanley Cup, he has played in over a thousand games in the NHL, and he ranks 14th among all active players in points per game (0.956). Among all players in NHL history with at least 700 games played, No. 19 ranks 19th with an average of .71 assists per game. Given all he has accomplished in his 15 full seasons in the NHL, he could have pulled the pin and called it a career after last season. Given the agony he endured on and off the ice, no one would have blamed him.
"I don't know how long this process has been, almost three years, right?" says Caps' general manager Brian MacLellan. "In my communication with him over this injury time period, I don't think he has ever thought, 'That's it [I'm retiring].' He has constantly been looking for a way to keep going, and it's been a hard, hard road. He went through the initial injury, and he was finding ways to compensate and work through it, and to try to continue to play.
"At one point here, he had an alternative treatment, and he came back and we had him with a skating coach, who was trying to help him be more efficient skating so he could work through the hip thing. He spent a lot of time with that, and it's been a constant thing for him. You watch him walk around the locker room with a limp, and you know he is in pain all the time. And you watch him in games, and he's still producing, not at the rate he used to, but he's still contributing to the team. And you watch how he's skating, and it wasn't quite where it normally was, and you see how he's working around it, finding ways around it.
"And then we come to the final decision, and he's like, 'Well, this is the last thing I'm going to try.' If it works, it works. And if it doesn't, it doesn't. And he was pretty adamant about wanting to keep trying to play. It's been pretty incredible to watch his passion, his determination and what he's gone through to get to this point, and we'll see how it goes from here, but it's pretty admirable, what he's done to get to this point."

There were times when it was unclear as to whether Sunday would ever come, whether Backstrom would ever be able to get himself to the point where continuing his career was a realistic possibility.
"What he has done," begins Oshie, "and for it to be somewhat uncommon for a hockey player to return to an elite level of play, I think it's almost a renewal of his career. I think there was a moment in time there when he had to make the decision [to have surgery], and in the early rehab afterwards he never told me personally, but in the back of my mind, I thought maybe there's a chance we never see 19 out there again.
"And for him to be feeling good again, to be out of pain finally - and I mean fully out of pain - it's first time since I met him. Because when I came in here [in a July 2015 trade with St. Louis], he was coming in right off his other hip surgery. With the hockey smarts that he has, and now him being out of pain and being able to move again, I think we're going to see that old Nicky, a freer Nicky, a guy that's just free of pain and is able to play the game that that he loves.
"I've talked to him about when he was growing up. He's a rink rat - kind of like myself - a guy that just absolutely loves the game and loves playing hockey and loves being in the big moments on the big stage on the ice. I think it's going to be a super important moment for him when he comes back. I think for the guys that know him really well, you can't help but maybe get a little emotional seeing 19 come back on the ice, because you know he's going to do well, he's just too smart not to. I'm super happy for him and his career and his family, and for little Vince and Haley and Alizee, who get to see their dad suit up again."
Someday, Backstrom's career will end. Someday, he will miss playing the game he loves. But not today. Today, at Capital One Arena in front of a full house of fans who adore him, he will be playing the game he loves.
"Even when I knew that I was going to try to come back last year, I had heard before that there was this last resort and that you could try and play on it," says Backstrom. "But obviously I wanted to explore all the options before I went into that. I tried the best I could, but I don't know how I got through the games, to be honest. It wasn't even fun for me.
"I was in a bad place, and it was an unknown couple of months thereafter when I came back and I felt like it wasn't getting any better. I think after the season, it was probably easy. I've done a lot of good things [in the game]. But I obviously don't want to end my hockey career first of all, with an injury. And second of all, I felt like I had more to give for the game that I love.
"I'm very fortunate to be able to play hockey for a living, and to play in this great organization and this city. I just wasn't ready to stop, and I wanted to give this another shot. And so far, so good."