The News Gets Even Worse For Utah on Sean Durzi & John Marino

This has not been a good 24 hours for the Utah Hockey Club's blueline. They've learned that two key top-four defensemen will be lost until far into the second half of the season.

First we learned from insider Frank Seravalli of Daily Faceoff that top-pairing defenseman Sean Durzi will be undergoing surgery and be out for most of the 2024-25 campaign.

#NHLonPrime insider @frank_seravalli reports Utah HC defenseman Sean Durzi will undergo surgery and is expected to miss 4-5 months after an injury sustained Monday vs. NJD. pic.twitter.com/BwI9IBQYFa
— Sports on Prime Canada (@SportsOnPrimeCA) October 18, 2024

Durzi is expected to miss four-to-five months while recovering, per Seravalli (the team is currently not releasing any details, however, except for saying it is not season-ending).

After Durzi first suffered the injury earlier this week, GM Bill Armstrong had said "it doesn’t look like he’s going to be back anytime soon." Now we know just how bad it really is.

Durzi signed a 4-year, $6 million AAV extension at the beginning of the offseason to be the team's No. 1 D-man.

But things got even worse later in the day on Friday, when head coach André Tourigny dropped the shocking news that big offseason acquisition John Marino, who the team was hoping would be returning from an upper-body training camp injury by November, will be gone for "months" as well.

Tourigny says it will be “months” before John Marino returns to the lineup.#UtahHC #NHL
— Brogan Houston (@houston_brogan) October 18, 2024

Marino had even been upgraded from week-to-week to day-to-day by the end of camp. Not so much now...

Utah acquired Marino in a trade from the New Jersey Devils this past summer, and he was expected to be a rock on the soon-to-be-Yetis blueline, as he'd posted solid numbers over his five-year NHL career. He has an overall plus/minus rating of +38 while averaging 20:45 of ice time per night with New Jersey and the Pittsburgh Penguins.

Utah now has to do some serious scrambling to patch up their ravaged blueline.