"Montreal Canadiens Face Uphill Battle: Kirby Dach's Second ACL Injury Poses Major Challenge"

As unlucky as center Kirby Dach has been with injuries, he’s not the first Montreal Canadiens player to suffer two ACL injuries requiring surgery. Andrei Markov also had rotten injury luck and went through the same thing.

Just like the center, the blueliner suffered a serious injury twice in a short span. The first time was during the playoffs in 2010, when he was taken out of action on April 30th in the first game of the second round series with the Pittsburgh Penguins. Shockingly, he returned to action at the end of October 2010, but he would only play seven games before being injured again on November 13, 2010.

The second serious knee injury would go on to sideline him for the season, and he would only return to action on March 10, 2012. Meaning he spent 16 months recovering from his second knee injury. That season, he could only muster three points in the 13 games he played.

From the 2012-13 season, however, he went on to play four near-complete seasons and looked like his old self, producing at the same rate that he did before. Markov’s injury history tells us that it’s possible to come back from two successive knee injuries, but it’s a long road.

While Jeff Gorton told us that Dach Summer has been great and that he was in good shape when he came to town in June to train and consult the doctors, and was ahead in his recovery plan, there was no footage of his skating. When he was injured in February and underwent a second operation, the team said he was expected to be ready for the 2025-26 season.

On Tuesday, Maxime Truman from Dans les coulisses reported that, according to his sources, Dach was still in rehab mode and didn’t skate with his teammates when he was in town for Nick Suzuki’s wedding because he would have had to do it with limitations.

There has been no official update on Dach’s health of late, but it wouldn’t be shocking if he weren’t ready for the start of the season, judging by how long it took Markov to recover from a second ACL operation. If he is not ready, however, the question of who will center Ivan Demidov on the second line becomes even more serious, and the need to acquire a second-line center becomes even more pressing.