Former Washington Capitals forward TJ Oshie retired from professional hockey in June due to his ongoing struggle to recover from chronic back pain.

The 2018 Stanley Cup champion missed the entire 2024-25 season on long-term injured reserve, but revealed in an episode of the “Spittin’ Chiclets Podcast” released Tuesday that he went to great lengths last year to try and return to the ice.

“I was in really bad shape. I would have to flex my glutes and squeeze my abs just to get my baby out of her crib,” Oshie said of his symptoms. “So I ended up getting stem cell injections in five discs in January, early January [2024]. And right away I was like… it was super painful. I was like, ‘I went through all this and I don’t feel better.’ Six weeks came and [my doctor] was like, ‘You can start training a little bit,’ and I still didn’t feel good. He was like, ‘You know, since you’re not playing and we’re not super rushed,’ he’s like, ‘Just give it 12 weeks.’

“And I’m not even kidding you. Like on the day of the 12-week mark, I was like, ‘Oh my, I’m moving.’ And so I got into the gym and… I did a detox with [my wife] for a week… and a week in, I was like, ‘All right, here we go.’ I started training fairly hard. Not like right before training camp type hard, but decently hard, thinking that maybe there was a flicker of a chance. And there really wasn’t enough time for me to give it a real go. But I just don’t think there was a chance that I would be able to [play] the way I would wanna play the game. I just don’t think the back would be able to sustain it.”

Oshie never did touch the ice for the Capitals last season. He lamented the fact that he hasn’t skated at all since the New York Rangers swept the team in Round 1 of the 2024 Stanley Cup Playoffs, a series in which he recorded just a single point — an assist on a John Carlson first-period tally in Game 3.

“[I] wasn’t in any position to go on the ice at all [last year],” Oshie said.

The 38-year-old father of four detailed the intense medical journey he embarked on as early as 2022 when his back issues first cropped up.

“I guess it would’ve been like the end of the 2022 season. Definitely in the ’23 season, where we had started having a lot of problems, and I did the MRIs, I did all the whatever needling, everything. I did everything,” Oshie recounted. “And I met with surgeons around the country that are like the big dogs, right? They do all the big athletes, and most of them all just said, ‘Your discs don’t look that bad. We could probably take a snapshot or MRI of like 20 other hockey players that play 15 years, and their backs are probably gonna look like this.’”

“So they’re like, ‘We’re not sure, maybe just take a break,’ and, ‘If you stop playing, you’ll be good.’”

After multiple trips back and forth to Minnesota for treatment — one of which Oshie revealed he needed his two daughters to travel with him “so they could help me through the airport” — he decided to consult other NHL players for alternative solutions. Vegas Golden Knights winger Mark Stone, who struggled with his own back injuries, suggested Oshie see his specialist in Denver, Colorado. That visit revealed the troubling source of Oshie’s pain and struggles.

“I had taken six months off at that point. I couldn’t work out, I wasn’t doing anything, and I still wasn’t getting any better, and he figured out that I had tears in my discs, multiple tears all the way through the disc,” Oshie detailed. “So he was like, ‘Every time you twist, every time you compress, decompress, those tears are tearing a little bit.’”

Those tears, compounded with squeezed nerves in his discs, were causing his back to seize up and prevent him from any free range of movement. Oshie recalled the time he went down with a non-contact injury against the Tampa Bay Lightning in February during the 2023-24 season. He needed to be helped off the ice, but what happened the next morning in the team hotel gave him a scare.

“My discs that are all bulging, there’s not a lot of space for the nerves, and I would spasm in like four different spots. So you’re just spasming against yourself,” Oshie said. “That’s why that clip of me, like on the ground, where we’re in Tampa, [we] went to [Sunrise,] Florida, and the next morning it was, I think it was probably a full 45 minutes. I was stuck on the ground spasming, and I couldn’t get to my phone, which was on the bed, and I couldn’t reach the hotel phone. So, it took me 45 minutes to just slowly inch over, pull the phone down from the cord, and call security to call the team. Luckily, they caught ’em right before they went to practice.”

Oshie said he received stem cell treatment “to fill in the tears” shortly after that episode and in recent months has been doing “good enough to be a normal human being.”