Of course Marc Staal has thought about life after hockey.
But right now, the Rangers’ 30-year-old defenseman is cleared to play, and is trying to regain his form as he recovers from his third recorded concussion, which kept him out three weeks in January until he returned Tuesday, the first game after the All-Star break.
“The biggest question for me, and for a lot of guys, is if you get hit and you feel that way, are you going to feel that way for the rest of your life?” Staal told The Post after Saturday’s practice. “Most doctors say that’s extremely, extremely rare — unless you keep on playing through it. Then you run into problems. If you just treat it and let it go, you should be fine. Hearing that was good.”
As Staal and his Rangers prepared to host the Flames as a Sunday afternoon Super Bowl preamble at the Garden, he thought back to his first concussion, the one his brother Eric gave him on Feb. 22, 2011. He was a little naive back then, and played through symptoms, even finishing a five-game playoff loss to the Capitals.
Now, he knows that was a bad choice. And he knows it has made him more susceptible to concussions from here on out. He doesn’t even know when he got this most recent one, after taking a couple of hard hits at Arizona on Dec. 29 as well as at Colorado on New Year’s Eve.
But after playing in a game against the Sabers on Jan. 3 and traveling to Philadelphia for a game the next day, Staal knew something was wrong.
“Going into the Buffalo game, I felt brutal all game,” Staal said. “It wasn’t horrible enough, not to travel from Colorado and back, and I was like, ‘OK, we’ll see.’ I was just kind of tired. I woke up in Philly after the Buffalo game and I knew something was up. I just needed to shut it down.”
Staal had been there before. After playing through that first concussion, he never felt right over that summer of 2011, and missed the first 36 games of the next season, returning for the Winter Classic in Philadelphia. He then suffered the horrific eye injury on a Jakub Voracek deflection on March 5, 2013, missing the final 27 games of that regular season, and playing in just one of the 12 playoff games.
He was then concussed again on a hit from the Devils’ Reid Boucher in December 2013, and missed 10 games.
So when he woke up in Philadelphia and didn’t feel right, the right call was easy to make.
“I had the feeling if I got hit or whacked, and it didn’t even need to be hard, it would’ve been a lot farther behind then I was already putting myself,” Staal said.
The fact is that the Rangers need Staal to be at his best if they want to shore up their sporadically porous defense. His 6-foot-4, 210-pound frame is the team’s best tool for clearing the front of the net, which has been a bugaboo throughout this season. Staal has teamed mostly with Nick Holden as a second pair coach Alain Vigneault can match up against other team’s offensive units.
“The way he defends, the way he using his stick, really permits us to have a lot of confidence defensively,” Vigneault said.
After an admittedly poor 2015-16 season, Staal was relatively happy with where his game was before the injury.
“I think we’re miles ahead of where we were last year, defensively,” Staal said. “I think we have lapses in games where we lose ourselves. And I think those moments, if we can clean up as a team and as a group, we do that and we’ll get better from it.”
But Staal also thinks about his life away from the rink, and his two young daughters. His current contract carries an annual salary-cap hit of $5.7 million through the 2020-21 season, when he will be 34. The lasting effects of concussions are something he has to think about, but it is hard to know if they could cut his career short.
“I think that’s a question [you deal with] when you get to it — and I didn’t get to it this time,” Staal said. “Sure, same thing with my eye, or anybody with a knee, you never know what’s going to happen. You deal with it when it comes. I think I just try not to look too far ahead in that regard.
“As long as doctors keep telling me that I can live a normal life from this point on, I’ll keep playing. When someone tells me that’s not the case, then I’ll start going down that road.”
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