TJ Oshie, a former winger for the Washington Capitals, walked away from the pro game this past June amid his unrelenting fight to overcome chronic trouble in his back.
A champion in 2018, the winger sat out the whole of 2024-25 while parked on the long-term injured list. Yet in a "Spittin' Chiclets Podcast" episode that came out Tuesday, he laid out the enormous effort he made the prior year in hopes of getting back on the ice.
In his own words, his condition had grown dire. He recounted needing to clench his glutes and brace his core merely to raise his infant daughter from the crib. To combat the problem, he said, stem-cell injections were administered into five separate discs at the start of the year, in the early days of January. The procedure hurt intensely right off the bat, and he remembered questioning why he felt no relief despite enduring all of it. Roughly six weeks later, his physician cleared him for some light conditioning, but he still wasn't right. Because he wasn't competing and nothing demanded urgency, the doctor told him to allow a full dozen weeks.
He swore he wasn't exaggerating: precisely when he reached that 12-week threshold, he realized he could finally move freely. He headed back to the weight room, completed a weeklong cleanse with his wife, then felt prepared to push himself. He cranked up the intensity reasonably hard — short of pre-camp levels but still substantial — holding onto the hope that even a sliver of a shot remained. There simply wasn't enough runway, he admitted, for a genuine attempt, and in the end he doubted he could perform the way he wanted, suspecting his back wouldn't withstand it.
The winger never once stepped onto the rink for Washington a season ago. He voiced regret over not having skated since New York's Rangers ousted Washington in the 2024 postseason's opening round — a set of games where his output totaled one solitary point, that being a helper when John Carlson scored during the first period of the third contest.
He said he was in no condition whatsoever to skate at any stage of the previous year.
The 38-year-old, a dad to four kids, traced the brutal medical saga whose roots reached to 2022, the point when his back complaints first surfaced.
He pinned the origin to roughly the close of that 2022 schedule, and unmistakably into the next year, when significant trouble set in. He went through scans, dry needling, and everything else, he said. He sought out the country's leading surgeons — the ones treating elite competitors — and the majority told him his discs didn't appear especially damaged, suggesting they could likely scan a couple dozen other players who had skated for a decade and a half and turn up comparable-looking backs.
Their verdict, as he relayed it, amounted to a shrug: perhaps just rest, and stepping away from the sport would set him right.
After repeated treatment journeys to and from Minnesota — during one, he said, his two young daughters traveled with him to help steer him through the terminal — he opted to poll fellow players for alternatives. A winger from the Vegas Golden Knights, Mark Stone, himself no stranger to spinal woes, steered him toward a specialist working in Denver. That consultation finally exposed the genuine source of his agony.
By that point he had spent half a year doing nothing, unable to exercise or accomplish much, and remained no better when the physician found tears penetrating fully through multiple discs. Each twist and every cycle of compression and release, the doctor told him, was widening those tears bit by bit.
Combined with pinched nerves around the discs, those tears were locking up his back and stripping him of any free movement. The winger pointed back to an injury without contact that he suffered in February against Tampa Bay's Lightning amid the 2023-24 schedule. He had to be assisted from the ice, and what unfolded the following morning at the team's hotel shook him.
TJ Oshie had to be helped off the ice with an apparent non-contact injury pic.twitter.com/DoIFfl9cXo — B/R Open Ice (@BR\_OpenIce) February 23, 2024
With every disc bulging, he explained, the nerves had little space, and he would lock up in roughly four different places simultaneously — essentially seizing against his own body. That, he said, explained the footage of him sprawled out; the club had flown from Tampa across to Sunrise in Florida, and come morning he figured he passed a solid three-quarters of an hour trapped on the floor convulsing, unable to grab the phone resting nearby on the mattress or to reach the room's landline. Those 45 minutes went to slowly creeping along, tugging the receiver down by its cord, and alerting security to flag the team — who intercepted the staff just ahead of practice.
Not long after that incident, the winger said, he underwent stem-cell therapy meant to patch the tears, and lately he has felt well enough to live like an ordinary person.
Update: Oshie shared an Instagram post on Sept. 7 detailing the precise physicians and remedies he turned to in fixing his spine.
His caption noted, in part, that he'd fielded plenty of inquiries regarding spinal discomfort and workouts following his Spittin' Chiclets appearance, stressed he holds no medical degree and urged people to do their own digging, and laid out what had worked in his case. He also credited the many club trainers and team physicians — with thanks to MedStar — plus teammates who stood beside him daily through his darkest stretches, helping him cope with broken bones, the spasms in his spine, head injuries, and all else that comes bundled with a life in pro hockey.