Canadiens’ Dach emerges from second knee injury poised to be impact player

BROSSARD, Que.— The rehabilitation process from reconstructive knee surgery starts with immobility. For a hockey player, or any professional athlete conditioned to be in perpetual motion, it’s torturous. There is the physical torment of being placed in a leg-locked brace and fitted for crutches, and then there’s the mental anguish of knowing the road to recovery will only begin to become visible several months after days of immobility.

Kirby Dach was 22 years old and moving faster than he ever had when he was stopped in his tracks by a hit that knocked him out of a game and onto a gurney. His collision with Chicago Blackhawks defenceman Jared Tinordi, in October of 2023, saw him suffer tears to the medial collateral and anterior cruciate ligaments of his right knee and exposed him to a grueling rehabilitation process he’d hoped to never experience again.

That hope was then dashed in Ottawa, on Feb. 22, 2025, in a game against the Senators.

“I just remember going to put my foot down after the hit and thinking, ‘You gotta be kidding me,'” Dach said during an 18-minute interview with Sportsnet Thursday.

It was moments after he met the media for the first time since before suffering the injury that he confirmed to us he tore his reconstructed ACL in a collision behind the Canadiens’ net.

“I was talking to (Canadiens head trainer Jim Ramsay),” Dach said. “I came back to the bench, looked at him and said, ‘It just happened again.’

“He was like, ‘No, it didn’t.’

“I was like, ‘Yeah, it did.’”

Six days later, Dach would once again go under the knife.

Between suffering the injury and having the surgery to repair it, he had nothing but time to contemplate the struggle that lay ahead.

Instead of wallowing in it, Dach resolved to make this experience different from the last one.

“You learn from your mistakes,” the now 24-year-old said. “You learn what went good for you in that rehab, and what your body didn’t respond well to. For the first two, three weeks (after immobilization of the knee), it’s a lot of just trying to bend the leg, extend the leg, get to full extension, get your range of motion back, slowly start to lose the crutches and begin to walk. It’s not like you’re re-learning how to walk, but it’s different; you’re trying to get rid of the limp and trying to even both sides out again.

“Eight weeks to 14 weeks is where it’s weird because you feel like you can do a lot more, but you can’t because that’s technically when it’s at its weakest. Everything is fusing, so you have to be careful not to push it too far. It’s really frustrating because you feel like, ‘I can do more, I want to do more,’ but you just physically can’t because it’ll destroy your knee. You have to take it easy from Weeks 8-14 and realize less is more, and I don’t think I really understood that the first time.”

It was fairly evident that there was a lot more Dach didn’t understand the first time.

Last December, after two months of struggling to find any semblance of his best game, Dach opened up to us about the hard truths he could no longer turn away from — that he hadn’t done the necessary work to put himself in the best position to have a successful return to play and that he needed to make a much deeper investment into his hockey career to realize the massive potential he flashed to be drafted third overall by the Blackhawks in 2019.

On Thursday, Dach talked about how that inflection point gave him the maturity to deal with things differently this time around.

“I was more and more patient with the rehab,” Dach said. “Once you get past 14 weeks, you’re able to do some jumping and light running and more strength training and single-leg isolated work. I think I had surgery Feb. 28. I was home mid-May, end of May. I can’t count those months in my head right now, but when I got home, I was able to transition straight into training and building strength.”

That process was a coordinated effort between Dach, Alberta-based athletic therapist and return-to-performance specialist Matt Yaworski, strength and conditioning coach Barry Butt, and Canadiens head of performance Dale Lablans.

“Before I went home, I put everybody in a group chat and we put the plan together,” Dach said. “This is the plan, everybody’s going to hold everybody accountable, we’re going to grind this out and be ready to start the season on time.

“There were long days in the summer where I was at the gym three, three-and-a-half hours. It was an hour-and-a-half of rehab, then a workout, and then a lower-body workout, into cardio work, into doing everything that I could in the gym because I wasn’t skating for the first little bit.”

The result was Dach getting back on the ice and arriving back in Montreal, in August, feeling, as he put it, “way better than I have in any of the previous years.”

The work on the mental side was just as rigorous and rewarding.

It started with pouring over video — and not just of the 57 games he played last season, over which he collected just 10 goals and 22 points and finished minus-29.

“I watched games from five years ago, four years ago, and last year,” Dach said. “Went through the whole rolodex of games that I’ve played over my career and just centred myself a little bit.”

Key realizations were made.

Dach skipped golf for recovery between workouts, swapping walking the course for resting his leg in a dynamic air compression massager. He was far more regimented with things like diet and sleep, and he spent hours reading instead of partying.

“I spent a lot of time putting my body, my leg, and my mind first this summer instead of just enjoying summer,” Dach said.

And then he talked about rediscovering and embracing the mentality that would allow him to present the best version of himself to the Canadiens.

“I looked back throughout my NHL career and figured the mindset I had when I was in junior was when I was at my best,” Dach said. “It’s tough to describe and keep it politically correct, but it was a very F-U mindset in junior; like, I want to be here the shortest amount of time I can be here and get to the next step. And I think you get to that next step and realize there’s no other next step to get to, but there’s levels to being in the NHL, and I realized in my mind that I wanted to be an elite player in this league, and I know I can be.

“I feel like I have that F-U mindset when I’m at my best. Certain guys are different, where if they get too angry, they lose it, and if they’re happy, then they’re really good. I feel I’m at my best when I can find that F-U mentality while also enjoying it, where it’s not overtaking me.”

It is the defiant mindset that carried Dach past his darkest days this past winter. It is the defiant mindset he needs to maintain to earn himself a new contract and silence his critics and detractors.

There are many of them, and he knows it.

But Dach says he’s confident he can drive a line from the middle of the ice and be an elite, two-way centre, and he’s happy he’s being put in a position to prove it by Canadiens coach Martin St. Louis.

When camp opened on Wednesday, St. Louis said Dach would be placed in the middle of his second line. And on Thursday, he put him right there between Ivan Demidov and Patrik Laine for practice.

Dach knows what will keep him in that place.

“I think as a centre on any line, you’re kind of dictating the way your line’s going to play,” he said. “Obviously, with Patty and Demi, it’s a lot of talent, a lot of skill. I think we’ve got everything we need to produce offensively and put up points. But I think we’ve got to bear down and be responsible defensively. I want Marty to be able to trust me enough to put me out at the end of games where we need to win a faceoff or to shut somebody down. I want to be able to take pride in doing that and look across at my matchup knowing I got the better of him at the end of the night.”

It’s something he hasn’t been able to do with consistency to this point in his career.

The first knee injury in 2023 brought Dach further away from doing it than he ever hoped to be.

The second one could’ve completely discouraged and derailed him, but he believes it had the opposite effect.

“I took time to mature a little bit off the ice and realize what it’s going to take for me to come back and be an impact player,” Dach said. “I think I’m just ready to play games and put everything from the past few years behind me in the rearview mirror and look forward to what’s next.”