Mike Sullivan could sense how difficult this was for Matt Rempe right away. The emotions of the 6-foot-9 Rangers forward \u2014 an imposing presence left to operate as a shadow of his usual self even after returning from a broken thumb \u2014 said it all.<\/p>\n
Earlier this month, Sullivan called Rempe into his office, and the pair spent 20 minutes discussing the health of Rempe\u2019s left thumb and what it meant for his spot in the lineup. He\u2019d missed 24 games after sustaining the injury during a fight with the Sharks\u2019 Ryan Reaves in October. <\/p>\n
It served as the first major injury of Rempe\u2019s career, the only one to require surgery, and even though he knew injuries were an inevitable part of the sport he was trying to carve out a career in, that didn\u2019t make it any easier to deal with. <\/p>\n
And in 12 games after returning to the Blueshirts lineup in mid-December, it would become clear to Sullivan that the lingering impacts of Rempe\u2019s thumb injury impacted his performance.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Mike Sullivan could sense how difficult this was for Matt Rempe right away. The emotions of the 6-foot-9…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":430350,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[66],"tags":[186,110483,11559,4823,385,978,99,358],"class_list":{"0":"post-430349","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-nhl","8":"tag-exclusive","9":"tag-matt-rempe","10":"tag-mike-sullivan-nhl","11":"tag-new-york-rangers","12":"tag-nhl","13":"tag-ny-sports-minute","14":"tag-sports","15":"tag-sports-plus"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/430349","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=430349"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/430349\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/430350"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=430349"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=430349"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=430349"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}