Couture on facial injury: 'A lot of these teeth are going to be taken out at some point'

A deflected puck that struck Logan Couture in the face over a week ago appears to have done a lot of damage.

The San Jose Sharks forward has been sidelined since the game in question against the Nashville Predators on March 25 and as Couture explained in great detail on Tuesday, the puck caused quite a lot of damage, according to Kevin Kurz of CSN Bay Area.

"Right when it happened I went to the Nashville room and their doctors and dentists did a great job trying to basically save my teeth," Couture said. "They had to move a lot of them around obviously from the impact of the puck. They were all shifted in my mouth. They did a great job at that time to try and save them.

"I went to Vanderbilt hospital, and they brought a guy in there to put what is called an arch-bar on my teeth to try and save them. … It wasn’t really a surgery, it was just kind of a procedure that they did.

"They’re all damaged," Couture said. "A lot of these teeth are going to be taken out at some point once the season is over. They’ll have to remove a lot of them from my mouth.

"It’s basically temporary to have some teeth in my mouth. That’s pretty much it. If they took them all out now then I would be almost toothless."

In the meantime, there is no concrete date for Couture's return to the Sharks lineup. Head coach Pete Deboer spoke to reporters Tuesday where he was rather ambiguous stating both he and Joe Thornton - who is day to day with a lower-body injury - could be back Saturday or even a month from Saturday.