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TORONTO — Mats Sundin may have played his last game as a Toronto Maple Leaf.
The 37-year-old captain will not be able to play Tuesday night against the Buffalo Sabres because his groin injury flared up again. Leafs head coach Paul Maurice said after Tuesday's game-day skate that if the injury does not settle down quickly, Sundin will not play in the Leafs' two remaining games, Thursday at the Air Canada Centre against the Ottawa Senators and the regular-season finale in Montreal on Saturday against the Canadiens.
Since Sundin will become an unrestricted free agent on July 1, and his future with the Leafs is uncertain, he may not appear in a Leaf uniform again. One player who is finished for the season is forward Kyle Wellwood. He was sent to Philadelphia for more surgery Wednesday on the sports hernia that has troubled him for more than year.
Maurice said the decision to pull Sundin from the lineup came after Monday's practice when Sundin's groin muscles became sore. He missed five games with a partially torn groin muscle and returned to the lineup last Thursday in Boston against the Bruins.
Toronto Maple Leafs captain Mats Sundin, left, and teammate Bryan McCabe congratulate goalie Vesa Toskala after they beat the Montreal Canadiens in Toronto on Saturday. (Fred Thornhill/Reuters)
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"He had been getting better," Maurice said. "He came back to practice [Monday] and we had the expectation he would feel considerably better and didn't, so he's not playing. If he doesn't feel better, he won't play the rest of the games."
However, when Maurice was asked to reflect on Sundin's season, one of his best since coming to the Maple Leafs in 1994, he dismissed the notion Sundin's days in Toronto are finished.
"I'll answer that question and someone over here will take a piece of it and say, 'Mats might be done for the year.' " Maurice said. "Then we'll spend three weeks putting out a fire that you and I just created for no reason.
"There's going to come a point in time, in six or seven years, when Mats retires. Then you're going to spend the next 20 years with parades, tributes, Mats Sundin nights, the ashtrays, the coffee cups, matchbooks.
"We'll let that all happen."
Sundin did not make himself available to reporters at Tuesday's skate.
Maurice said the surgery to be performed on Wellwood is "a minor procedure." The subject of the surgery will be the groin muscle on the opposite leg to the one that was the source of his sports hernia.
"That is fairly normal when you have one [injury] on one side," Maurice said. "He will be done for the season."
Wellwood missed 34 games last season after hernia surgery. He was slow to recover over the summer and there was speculation he was not diligent in his rehabilitation and physical conditioning program. Wellwood then had to have more surgery on the injury in September and was out of the lineup until November 6.
Since then, Wellwood was never close to the player he was last season when he had 42 points in 48 games.
Matt Stajan will take Sundin's place as the No. 1 centre between wingers Alexei Ponikarovsky and Nik Antropov. Andrew Raycroft will get his first start in goal since January 20.
