NEW YORK _ Chelsea Pier is cold. Very, very cold. Maybe that is what Peter Forsberg was dressed in a full length heavy winter coat.

Foppa's Footpa has gone a new dimension. He now beleives there is a correlation between the deformed right foot slipping out of his skate boot and his right groin pull suffered Wednesday night against the Islanders.

He expects to miss a week to 10 days with what the club is calling a "mild" groin strain.

Welcome Thomas Gill, the noted foot and ankle specialist at Mass General, who also sees some of the players on the Celtics and New England Patriots, we're told.

Forsberg will visit Gill at Mass General on Friday when the Flyres travel to Boston.

“He feels that the foot is still moving too much in the skate,” said Flyers trainer Jim McCrossin. “We thought we had it licked but there is still some motion in there.”

McCrossin order some new tests that most of us thought had already been done. He had x-rays taken of Forsberg's two feet to study the angulations of the metatarsal bones to see if there are any clues that might help them solve the mystery.

“It has not been done before,” Forsberg said of the angulations study. “We’re checking everything, so we can say at least it’s not that. I didn’t have groin problems before [in Colorado], maybe once or twice in 10 years.

“You try to push off and it slips a little bit. Puts too much pressure on the groin. I can’t be 100 percent sure it is or is not [related to the foot problem]. So it’s not only being not 100 percent, but you get hurt out there, also.”

**

Stefan Ruzicka has been given the chance of a lifetime this season with the Flyers because of all these injuries. A chance to play.

Ruzicka is in coach John Stevens' dog house now after failing to do a post-game bike ride following the Flyers' 3-2 win over the Islanders. He was a healthy scratch that game just as he was the game previous against Carolina.

Stevens embarrassed Ruzicka in front of his teammates by not allowing him to practice with them. Then he and Craig Berube worked him out with shooting drills after the practice. Not surprisingly, Stevens was tight-lipped, calling it an "internal matter."

Ruzicka admitted what he did and said he didn't think it would have any harmful overtures.


**

Alexei Zhitnik was it by a puck over the right eye against the Islanders. His eye was closed yesterday and looked awful.

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