Gaborik: No excuses; but late in playoffs "shot wasn't there"

                    Marian Gaborik, who will undergo surgery June 6 to repair a torn labrum in his right shoulder, just had a brief conference call:                 

                    The injury occured April 18 from a hit in Game 4 in Ottawa when he went “into the boards behind the net…shoulder first,  that was the real play when it got worse. You just try to play through it.”  It may have been a hit by Chris Neil at 6:01 of the third period.

                    Gaborik said by the time of the New Jersey series: The shoulder “was just weak, no power...Shooting was…my shot wasn’t there.”

                    But Gaborik said that at no point did he consider shutting down or consider surgery

                    “I tried to put it aside, not just me a lot of guys were banged up, you try not to think about it…I didn’t think about surgery until the MRI (this week). Everybody’s banged up, you just want to go out there and go for it.”

                     Instead, he regularly received treatment.

                     “Just tried to take care of it and tried to play the best I could; I don’t want to make excuses. I know I could play better.”  He also declared that the long benching in Game 2 of the Devils series had “nothing to do with the injury.”

                      When he learned the diagnosis he said: “Obviously frustrated, I knew I wasn’t okay, I was hoping for better answers from the doctor. Now I just have to focus on getting back healthy.”

                     Gaborik said he was going to “do everything I can to be back before… five months…that’s the theory.”