So many thoughts flooded through Johnny Boychuk almost immediately after Mitch Marner’s skate blade made contact with his neck.
The Islanders defenseman, 35, was thinking about his father. He was thinking about his wife and children. He was thinking he wanted to be anywhere but on the ice in front of a sellout crowd of 13,917 at NYCB Live’s Nassau Coliseum if he truly was gravely injured.
“It was really scary,” Boychuk said a day after the Islanders’ 6-1 win over the Maple Leafs on Thursday night, sporting a two-inch cut under his cheekbone on the left side of his neck that somehow did not require stitches.