The Red Wings provided an update on Andrew Copp Tuesday, after the veteran forward left Saturday’s game against Anaheim with an upper-body injury.
The Wings say that Copp had successful surgery to repair his left pectoral tendon, and that he will miss the remainder of the season. The expected recovery time for this injury is 4-6 months. You can rewatch the play where Copp got injured here.
The injury happened following a dust-up caused by a huge hit from Alex DeBrincat that put defenseman Brock Faber on his back. That hit was clean, but the Wild took exception from that and caused a ruckus. Copp, coming to the aid of his teammates, fell to the ice and immediately started favoring his arm. At first I thought this was broken forearm or even torn labrum, so I guess I wasn’t too far off.
Forward Sheldon Dries was recalled from Grand Rapids as some insurance depth, considering that Detroit will be missing both Copp and Michael Rasmussen in tonight’s game against Minnesota.
So what does this mean for Detroit’s salary cap? According to the experts at PuckPedia, Detroit has $3 million of projected cap space (following the Husso trade) and $14 million of deadline space. Copp going to LTIR won’t grant anymore cap space unless Detroit first added $14 million of annual cap hit. LTIR is a mechanism that allows a team to exceed the salary cap, and since they are below the cap, Copp’s absence won’t provide any benefit.
