That cautious approach has allowed Draisaitl to get the rest, recovery and rehab needed to put him on the best course to be ready for Game 1 of the playoffs, but it might end up coming later in Round 1.<\/p>\n
“I think nobody knows their bodies better than the athletes themselves,” he said. “I know my body better than anyone in the world, and I know when I’m ready to go and when I’m forcing it. I’m highly aware of that, and this isn’t an injury that you force anything with.<\/p>\n
“I’m gonna see how I feel by the end of the week, and hopefully it feels great and I’m an option. Maybe it’s a couple of games later, but we’ll see.”<\/p>\n
Head Coach Kris Knoblauch said it’s too soon to confirm Draisaitl’s availability for Game 1 of the postseason, given what he’s played through in the past, but they can be reassured that, when he is given the green light,\u00a0he’ll be more than ready to go.<\/p>\n
“I think it’d be premature to say that he’d be healthy to play ready today, so he’s got a process to go through,” Knoblauch said. Hopefully, with the skates and the rehab treatments that he’s getting, he’ll be ready for us.<\/p>\n
“Ideally, it’d be Game 1. If it’s Game 3 or 4, then so be it.\u00a0 We’re going to have to adjust.\u00a0 But we know Leon will play through a lot of pain, and he wants to play in the Stanley Cup Playoffs more than anything. So there’s never any doubt about his will, and we’d be very fortunate to have him in game one, but we’ll have to wait and find out.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"That cautious approach has allowed Draisaitl to get the rest, recovery and rehab needed to put him on…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":267092,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[151,153,152],"class_list":["post-267091","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-bakersfield","tag-bakersfield","tag-bakersfield-headlines","tag-bakersfield-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/267091","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=267091"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/267091\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/267092"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=267091"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=267091"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=267091"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}