Last week, news broke that star goaltender Thatcher Demko is expected to miss the Vancouver Canucks' training camp and preseason and is questionable to be ready for the start of the regular season. That was already going to be a complicated situation for the Canucks but now there are concerns about his expected backup, Arturs Silovs.
Silovs took centre stage at the 2023 World Championship, where he led Latvia to a historic bronze medal — the first IIHF medal for Latvia at any level — and was named tournament MVP. Accordingly, he was expected to be Latvia's number one goaltender at their qualifying tournament this weekend for the 2026 Winter Olympics.
Instead, Silovs was left off the roster entirely when it was announced Wednesday morning.
Now, this could have been nothing to worry about. Sometimes NHL players won't playing qualifying tournaments at the request of their NHL teams. For instance, the Montreal Canadiens' Juraj Slafkovsky and Tampa Bay Lightning's Erik Cernak told The Athletic's Michael Russo that they won't be playing for Slovakia at their Olympic qualifier after Slovakian general manager Miroslav Satan spoke with their respective NHL GMs.
“You can get hurt,” said Cernak. “Anything can happen. You would want to be there, but at the same time, you have to look forward to your season and training camp and getting ready for the new season. Hopefully, the guys can do it and we can go to the Olympics. I’m confident they’re gonna do it. The group is not as hard as the other ones.”
Did the Canucks ask Latvia to remove Silovs from the roster, perhaps in response to the uncertain timeline for Demko's return? That information has not been forthcoming.
What is known is that Silovs was expected to play in the tournament as recently as Monday. That's according to Latvia's head coach, Harijs Vitolins, who held Silovs out of the team's two pre-tournament exhibition games but assured reporters he would play in the tournament itself.
"He is ready to start the tournament," said Vitolins according to a DeepL translation of his original quote in Latvian. "If I'm not mistaken, he had his first training session on June 12, so he's overworked. Since then he has trained four times a week. Arturs is in good physical condition, he is currently overworked and the medical staff has determined that the danger of this situation developing into a chronic injury is high. We decided to protect him a little bit, we'll see."
It's hard to capture the nuance of a statement made in another language, particularly one that's gone through a machine translation rather than a human translator, but it's hard not to be concerned when the phrase "hroniskā savainojumā" — "chronic injury" — is used.
That said, the initial comment from Vitolins was that Silovs was "ready to start the tournament." What changed since Monday?
According to NHL.com reporter Kevin Woodley in an interview on Sportsnet 650, Canucks general manager Patrik Allvin had no issues with Silovs playing for Latvia in the tournament.
"I talked to Patrik Allvin...two Mondays ago and when I asked him about goaltending, the one thing was that Demko is in town, working with the team, and they were still hopeful he'd be ready for the start of the season," said Woodley. "And the other part was that he was excited about Arturs and the opportunity to play in Olympic qualifying as part of his process to get ready for the season."
Did something change in the past two weeks? Did the Canucks get bad news about Demko's availability to start the season and ask for Latvia to rest Silovs and avoid him getting "overworked"? Or did Silovs pick up an injury in training and need to be rested to avoid it turning into a "chronic injury"? Neither possibility sounds particularly good for the Canucks.
That said, there are still three weeks until the start of training camp. A lot can happen — hopefully positive — in that time.
UPDATE
Sure enough, Silovs is injured.
"Originally, goaltender Arturs Šilovs was supposed to be selected for the tournament, but unfortunately he did not recover quickly enough from knee ligament inflammation, which prevents him from playing as hard as he can," reads a tweet from the Latvian Ice Hockey Federation, according to a DeepL translation. "The injury could jeopardize the start of the NHL season for the Vancouver Canucks."
As before, nuance can be difficult to parse when using a machine translation of another language. It's entirely likely that the intended meaning is that Silovs playing in the tournament could have jeopardized him being ready for Canucks training camp but that refraining from playing will allow him to properly rest and be fully recovered in a few weeks' time.
Indeed, that appears to be the case, according to ChekTV's Rick Dhaliwal, who got hold of Latvia general manager Rūdolfs Kalvītis.
The Canucks have not, as of yet, made a statement regarding Silovs.
