Mitch Marner injury more serious than initially reported.

Sheldon Keefe may not exactly have been up front about the seriousness of Mitch Marner's injury.

After Marner missed his second game since being injured this past Thursday, the Maple Leafs are now admitting that Marner's situation may be worse than was initially reported.

Keefe initially downplayed the injury as merely "day to day" when Marner went down against the Boston Bruins on March 7th, but fast forward 9 days later and Marner remains out of the lineup. Keefe confirmed this week that Marner would sit out Saturday's game against the Carolina Hurricanes and left open the possibility that Marner could miss more games moving forward.

"It's more than that at this point," admitted Keefe. "He won't skate tomorrow and then we have a day off so a couple days for him to settle and sort of ramp it back up for next week."

Although not officially confirmed by the Maple Leafs, it sounds like Marner is dealing with a high ankle sprain. An injury of this nature is difficult to gauge a recovery time for given the wide variance we have seen historically, even among players in the National Hockey League.

On Saturday morning Dr. Ali Rendely indicated that the NHL average for a high ankle sprain is 8 games missed, although added that the range in that category varies from 0 games missed all the way up to 65 games missed. Marner has of course only missed 2 games of action so far so that still leaves him very much on the lower end of the spectrum.

That also may suggest that Marner will remain out for a considerable length of time still to come.