Logan Cooley out vs. Blues, day to day for Mammoth

"Day to day" usually means a guy is fine. Listen to how Tourigny actually said it, though.

Cole Bagley

@BagleyKSLsports

Tourigny on Cooley’s situation: “Cooley is day to day. Not today but day to day. In all fairness, there are more exams. I say day to day, I don’t even know if I’m accurate.” “They’re still evaluating the situation. We don’t really know.”

Cole Bagley

@BagleyKSLsports

More injury updates: Cooley won’t play tonight and is considered day to day but they have more exams that need to be done. “They’re still evaluating the situation but we don’t really know.” Schmaltz is a game time decision. Marino is still weeks away. Schmidt is considered week to week.

"I say day to day, I don't even know if I'm accurate" is not what you want to hear from your head coach about your best young centre. The upper-body injury came out of nowhere, too. Cooley was a full participant in practice Monday and Tuesday, then got ruled out before Wednesday's 5-3 loss to Vegas. That loss got worse when Nick Schmaltz took a hard hit into the boards, came back for a couple of shifts, left again and was called questionable to return with a lower-body injury.

So Schmaltz is a game-time decision, John Marino is still weeks away and Nate Schmidt is week to week. Then there's Dylan Guenther, who went on injured reserve with an upper-body injury and is out roughly 2-4 weeks. Add it up and the Mammoth are missing 3 of their 4 best forwards and 2 of their top-4 defensemen, and they bring a 3-game losing streak into the Blues game. That's a brutal week.

The other bench noticed. Blues coach Jim Montgomery kept his reaction short when he heard who Utah would be missing.

Brogan Houston

@houston_brogan

Blues head coach Jim Montgomery on finding out that the Mammoth are missing so many key players: “Good timing.” #TusksUp #STLBlues

At least he's honest. You'd say the same thing if you walked into a building and the other team's top line was in street clothes. Tourigny went the other way and made it a movie pitch about his banged-up roster.

Brogan Houston

@houston_brogan

Absolute banger of an analogy from André Tourigny today, speaking of all his injured stars: "Never seen a movie built around 'everything is easy, everything went smooth and we didn't have adversity and we won.' I never saw that movie. "You want to be in the movie where you go through the grind, you go through the trenches, the bullets are flying and you push through and you make it. "That's what we're in. Let's make it." #TusksUp

Credit to him, that's a great quote, and you need that energy when your lineup looks like this. Now the question is how deep this goes. If Cooley's exams come back clean and Schmaltz gets through warmups, Utah is short-handed but can survive it. If either one turns into a longer absence and someone else in the top 6 goes down, the Mammoth will have to dig into their prospects. Watch for Cooley's exam results and the Schmaltz call before puck drop. That decides whether this is a rough week or a rough month.