Johnny Gaudreau looking at six-week recovery

CALGARY-- The Calgary Flames expect forward Johnny Gaudreau to miss about six weeks after having surgery to repair a fractured finger on his right hand Wednesday.
Gaudreau was injured against the Minnesota Wild on Tuesday.

"In speaking to the doctors [Wednesday] night and [Thursday] morning, they're really happy with how everything went," Flames general manager Brad Treliving said. "The next question everybody wants to know is, how long?
"We don't know. We're sort of working around a six-week time frame. Hopefully it's shorter. Everybody heals in different ways and different time frames. When you're talking about a broken bone and the procedure that's been done, that's sort of the timeline that's been done. We're 24 hours into this.
"It's an unfortunate situation, but with the injury and the subsequent surgery, everything went as well as expected, and now we're on the road to recovery."

Gaudreau's surgery was performed by hand specialist Dr. Rod French in Vancouver.
"It's about as good as news as you can get," Treliving said. "He's got some hardware in there. The way it fixed onto the bone, they were real happy with how it went. You wait and you work through it and hopefully he's back sooner rather than later."
Gaudreau left the game at 7:22 of the third period after taking a stick to his hand from Wild forward Eric Staal. Gaudreau scored the goal in the 1-0 win.
Gaudreau led Calgary in scoring with five goals and 11 points. He led the Flames with 30 goals and 48 assists, and finished tied for sixth in the NHL, with 78 points last season.
In 177 NHL games, Gaudreau has 60 goals and 154 points.
"There's no Johnny Gaudreau tree," Treliving said of replacing him. "But what you can do is find people putting a little bit more into it, get a little bit more from your group here individually, a little bit more percentage points, and everyone's got to pull up, and as a group pull together and find ways to dig in. That's the recipe."
Without Gaudreau, the Flames (7-10-1) defeated the Arizona Coyotes 2-1 in overtime on Wednesday.

Calgary hosts the Chicago Blackhawks on Friday (9 p.m. ET; SNW, CSN-CH, NHL.TV) before starting a season-high, six-game road trip.
"The grieving stage is real short," Treliving said. "We've got games to play. We've got points that we've got to find. So it's up to the group in there. We know what Johnny means to the team, but it's next man up here. We don't have time to feel sorry for ourselves. This group's got to come together.
"We need a little more from everyone else. We've got to find ways to win. This is the fact of life in the League. Everybody goes through injuries. You deal with them and you find ways to have success."