Forward Brock Boeser will return to the Vancouver Canucks‘ lineup Tuesday night in Boston, coach Rick Tocchet confirmed.
Boeser has been sidelined since taking an illegal check to the head by Los Angeles Kings forward Tanner Jeannot on Nov. 7. Jeannot was suspended three games, and Boeser has missed the last seven contests.
The Canucks are 7-1-0 on the road heading into their game against the Bruins.
“A guy like Brock, he wants to play every game,” Tocchet said Tuesday morning. “Played a lot of hockey for us over the years. It’s good to have a guy like that in the lineup.” Boeser, 27, recorded 11 points (six goals, five assists) in 12 games before the injury.
He has 395 points (185 goals, 210 assists) in 491 career games since Vancouver drafted him in the first round (23rd overall) in 2015.
The NHL ruled that Jeannot “cuts across the front of Boeser’s body, missing his core and making his head the main point of contact, on a hit where such contact was unavoidable.”
The hit met two criteria for an illegal check to the head: first, that the head is the main point of contact, despite contact with other parts of Boeser’s body, and second, that while Boeser was eligible to be hit, Jeannot took the wrong approach delivering what was deemed an illegal check.
This was only Jeannot’s second run-in with the NHL Department of Player Safety. He was fined $2,000 for kneeing Ottawa’s Brady Tkachuk in March 2022, when Jeannot was a member of the Nashville Predators.
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Information from ESPN’s Greg Wyshynski was used in this story.