5 NHL players who’d really like a do-over for the 2017-18 season

2. Jeff Carter

Jeff Carter is on the sunny side of the street these days, especially after scoring a hat trick to keep his Los Angeles Kings in the playoff hunt. But before he returned from a lacerated ankle tendon, there were four months of dark, dark days, leading to major thoughts of a do-over.

Namely, the fortunes of the Kings were seemingly hinging on the hard-driving scoring center coming into this season, especially considering this was a transition year after a springtime front-office house-cleaning. And the always-reliable Carter — who was the Kings’ leading scorer last season — was expected to provide good depth scoring behind Anze Kopitar, who was surely on the rebound after a lousy 2016-17 season (and boy, did he). But then Carter went down on Oct. 18 with an injury just as gruesome as it sounds, having recorded just three points in six games. For Carter, it’s not so much a do-over than a can-I-play-those-games-I-missed kind of thing.