When I was barely eight years old, I got hit in the neck during a softball game. To this day, I remember only three things about the incident. Initially, I was both furious and stunned—stunned by the injury and furious at both being injured and about what had just happened on the play (the specifics of the play itself, to this day, I can’t actually recall). Second, though I was both mad and shocked, I remember being determined and convinced that I was perfectly fine and capable of finishing the softball game.
What I didn’t know—what my father, who coached my team, and my mother, watching from the stands, could see—was a red welt developing on my neck from where the softball had hit my neck. I needed to have ice on my neck. I didn’t need to be playing softball.
The last thing I remember about that incident is that I—the kid who rarely threw any kind of temper tantrums—threw a doozy of a tantrum about the fact that my parents would not let me return to play to the softball game. I put ice on my neck, and as I walked (actually ran, quite angrily) home with the ice on my neck, I was still screaming that I was fine and that I could have played and that I didn’t need ice on my neck and that I should still be playing.
Likely it comes as no surprise that a child whose only temper tantrum, pre-adolescence, was about not being able to return to a softball game, would quickly and quite easily latch onto ice hockey as a favorite sport. In the two plus decades that have passed since that spring softball game, I, as a fan of hockey, have witnessed my favorite athletes play through all kinds of pain:
I am a fan of hockey. Even in club hockey, “play through pain” is part and parcel of the sport. A club goaltender for a college hockey team tears cartilage in his hip in the second game of the season. Knowing what a doctor will say, he avoids the doctor until season’s end, when the doctor informs him he requires surgery to repair his torn hip cartilage. The doctor is bemused, but not surprised, to learn that a hockey player has used Icy Hots and Advil to numb pain that NHL players who opt to wait for such surgery numb with cortisone shots. Another player on that same college hockey team regularly has his shoulder pop out during games; each time it happens, he simply returns to the bench to have a trainer pop the shoulder back into place so he can continue to play. Even in recreational men’s league hockey, an engineer who makes his living in IT shows up at a client site with two black, blue, and broken fingers, but he doesn’t consider skipping his real job or his next recreational game due to the minor annoyance of barely broken fingers.
Hockey players, of any age, play hurt.
But what about—not the shoulder or the knee or fingers or torn cartilage—what about when it’s their head?
What about when the whole mentality of “It’s just pain; I’ll play through it” has to be replaced with “This isn’t pain it’s safe to play through”—is it even possible for such a mental shift to occur?
To understand a hockey player, take a look at what Brooks Laich of the Washington Capitals had to say about head injuries.
While you might wince at Laich’s comments, he is simply a hockey player speaking from the heart and mindset of a hockey player.
Last January, Sidney Crosby was actually the physical embodiment of Laich’s verbal words. Crosby, who missed almost an entire year of hockey, now speaks differently than Laich and acknowledges he should not have played against the Tampa Bay Lightning after receiving a check from David Steckel in his previous game against the Washington Capitals. Ten months ago, though, Crosby was just the best hockey player on the planet, one trained to be a hockey player, so while he had neck pain he assumed it was just pain and he’d play through it and get over it and be fine—so he played the next game.
Just like Laich and Crosby, last Saturday night in Montreal another hockey player was just doing what hockey players do. Crosby’s teammate, defenseman Kris Letang, got hit in the head hard, broke his nose, and returned to play. Not only did Letang return to play in overtime, he—dynamically—started a rush up the ice, avoided a check from the player who had hit him in the head and broken his nose, and deposited the puck behind the Montreal goaltender to score the overtime winner.
A week later, Letang has yet to play another game, and the calls have come: "Who let him back on the ice? What's wrong with the Pittsburgh medical staff? Why didn't the Penguins learn their lesson with Crosby?"
Putting on the dispassionate Consultant hat, let’s examine Hockey Culture and the roles of a player, coach, medical staff, and management/ownership.
-If a player can play, a coach will play that player. Watch Letang score the overtime winner and tell me if he looks like an angry, determined, perfectly competent All-Star defenseman channeling all his energy and pain into winning a game or like an injured, out-of-it, possibly concussed elite athlete who should not be playing. If you’re Dan Bylsma and one of your players has arrived and shown himself able to play and the doctors have said he is OK to play, you do what coaches do and put your best players on the ice to help your team win the game.
-Doctors employed by hockey teams do not have the same job descriptions as those of doctors and dentists for the rest of the population. I have been told to avoid vigorous activity after root canal surgery; Martin St. Louis’s dentist has to make sure he’s good for a playoff game the day after emergency root canals. Doctors have to make sure Steven Stamkos, broken nose and all, is back for the remainder of the seventh game of the playoff series.
-Owners and management set a culture for their team. They can say and absolutely mean, “Protect the long-term asset over short-term gain.” But, typically, those businesspeople aren’t next to the player, coach, or doctor when it comes to determining if an injured player returns to game play.
So, what the heck do you do if, as a league, you want to make sure your best players are actually playing their best hockey for all to see? If, as a fan, you want to see that same magic? If, as an organization, you want that for your organization? If you’re a player and you want to be able to play as well as possible for long as possible, how do you get that?
If you think it’s good for hockey for Sidney Crosby and Kris Letang to be able to play hockey together—at the heights of their talents (and the two do make magic together)—for the next decade. If you think it’s better for hockey to see David Perron and Marc Staal playing hockey than sitting out portions of seasons. Then, is there anything—aside from teaching players not to deliver blindside headshots and disciplining them when they make that mistake—that could help make sure hockey players hit in the head don’t hurt themselves by being hockey players and coming back quickly?
Someone has to be the parent here. And, as you examine hockey culture, let’s look at if anyone allegedly “to blame” for the Crosby and Letang incidents is actually able to take on the parental role:
-Players are incapable of parenting themselves. Hockey players default to the Brooks Laich quote. It’s probably fair to say that Letang would be playing through the pain of a broken nose right now Pittsburgh hadn’t been through the Crosby injury. Letang himself is probably slightly more willing to sit out than he would be ordinarily after seeing all his teammates endured over the past ten months. But be quite confident there’s a reason Letang was on the ice at Pittsburgh’s Monday practice, seeing if he could play against the Rangers on Tuesday. He’s a hockey player—and when it comes to the game, these men are players, not parents.
-Coaches—caught up in the heat of the moment—can’t be parents all the time, and it’s an unrealistic expectation to expect a coach to take on the parental role consistently. Coaches are to run hockey teams and win games. It means sitting out players if the game is out of hand so as not to risk injury, but it is also making sure star players are happy with their ice time so they put forth effort in the system at all times. A coach’s job is to take the players he is given and win the game. If a player is there, a coach’s default—even if a wise parental voice might chirp at him—is to do what it takes, within reason, to win the regular season game. And to whatever it takes, at all times, to win the playoff game.
-Doctors should be able to take on the parental role. Contrary to a popular belief, however, doctors are not deities. They don’t know everything. Given what medicine still doesn’t fully know about concussions, and what we’re still learning in terms of delayed symptoms for Marc Staal and how David Perron could play the rest of the game before being unable to exercise for a very long time, doctors don’t necessarily know enough in the immediate aftermath to make an accurate diagnosis. But if a player can exhibit no signs of a concussion when his adrenaline is pumping and if he appears to be fine by any medical diagnosis—try being the doctor who tells a hockey player or a hockey coach that “He’s perfectly fine, but I won’t let him help you win this game.”
-Ownership and management could play the parental role. They could set policies. But how well do policies work out when adrenaline is pumping and you’re dealing with hockey’s default culture? Owners and managers aren’t on the ice when the ice level decisions are made. Unless an owner is coming down from his box and physically restraining a determined player and telling a doctor he doesn’t care if the player is cleared, he can’t play—when something happens like what happened in Montreal last Saturday, is a team’s ownership going to do that? How?
So, if an examination of Hockey Culture finds that no one in the game can truly be a parent—and if those who could take on the role aren’t usually near ice level to take on such a parental role—how do you protect the players at ice level if it so happens they get hit in the head during a game?
The NHL—yes, the NHL—has to change the on-ice protocol. To change things at ice-level, you have to change the ice-level protocol.
Meaning: If a player is hit in the head—and these things still happen—and he has to leave the game, you have to eliminate the option for the player to return and be the overtime hero.
Because the player is still going to default to perform his heroics, and no one in hockey would have it any other way. David Perron (who couldn’t play for more than a year) came back to score a goal in the same game in which he was injured before sitting out 97 NHL games.
Such a protocol would mean Sidney Crosby isn’t going to be able to play the third period of a nationally televised, ridiculously hyped hockey game. And such a protocol, of course, would eliminate the chance for Letang to shrug off his broken nose and score the overtime game winner,a feat which prompted excited, instantaneous Tweets from many in the hockey world, and which prompted his teammates, at their next practice, to greet him with enthusiastic cheers and stick taps, hockey’s universal sign of respect.
But we know Crosby missed 10 months of hockey. We don’t know for sure if not playing the next game would have helped, but we can’t help but wonder if he should have just rested, right away. Do we want any more players out of the game for 10 months like that if we can prevent it?
So it’s time for a new protocol, for any headshot that occurs. For any time a player has to leave the ice because of being hit in the head. For the sake of the player, for the sake of the game: Any hit to the head that causes a player to leave the ice—and they have to leave the ice, per protocol—they’re not allowed to come back to that game.
Brooks Laich doesn’t have to like it, and he can complain about being treated like a child into perpetuity. I wouldn’t expect there is a hockey player alive, or a coach, or anyone in the game itself, who will like or clamor for such a protocol. I’d expect the players all respond as my eight-year-old self did to what I viewed as an unnecessary ice pack on my hurting but perfectly fine and swelling neck. I’d expect they’d scream and yell and moan—and I’d expect I wouldn’t want them to do anything else except be grown, more determined versions of my eight-year-old self screaming, “But I CAN play and I WANT to play!”
But I don’t care how much the hockey players scream and yell and moan if I put myself in the position of a league that needs to have hockey players play hockey. That needs to see retired players be able to go onto post-playing careers and still be coherent, still be able to be sons and fathers and brothers and husbands.
The NHL has to step into the role of the wise parents who hand their obstinate and insane—and, yes, injured—eight-year-old daughter an ice pack to put on a rapidly swelling neck.
The NHL has to step into the role of the wise parents who hand their obstinate and insane—and, yes, injured—eight-year-old daughter an ice pack to put on a rapidly swelling neck.
Don’t worry. Hockey players will still be hockey players. They’ll still play through insanity that will astonish the rest of us. But the NHL can’t give them the option to try to outskate what no human being can outskate because they’re hockey players and they will try to do that because that’s who they are.
The NHL can no longer give any hockey people an option. The league must say, “No, you’re not finishing the game. You’re not coming back until you’re ready, as shown by computerized tests in addition to a doctor’s clearance.”
So, NHL , the pen is in your hand. Change the protocol. And, perhaps, the league won’t be missing as many players in the prime of their careers who merely played through pain as they were trained and taught and expected to do when their league should have utterly eliminated any option for them to play through a particular pain of a brain injury that no human—not even the strongest of men—can play through sans consequence.
Just let the league keep those in the game safe, from themselves—and, by the way, the reason they have to do that:
Back in the 2009 Easter Conference semifinals, Letang played through an injury that could be played through. His response to a hurt shoulder in Game 2 was to score the overtime winner in Game 3 after having a hard time shooting the puck in most of Game 3.
Want to see more plays like that and make as many snarky comments as you want about it not being a wise idea to hurt Letang because he just seems to score overtime winning goals whenever he gets hurt?
Want to see guys playing through everything it’s safe for them to play through, but not playing through a brain injury that’s going to deprive them of being able to play at the highest level for as many seasons as their bodies will let them?
With a new protocol, we’ll find hockey will still be hockey, and we’ll still see plenty of heroics like this with plenty of players playing through pain.
And I think everyone in hockey would agree—that’s what we want.
And if that’s what we want, then, in addition to eliminating the headshots in the first place—it’s on the NHL to eliminate the option for its players to play through headshots.*
(*Yes, of course, as with anything there will be new issues that arise. Players trying to get around the rule by not going off. People screaming it’s the playoffs so let them play. People trying to see that the star player who took a little bump is off the ice for the rest of the game. But just because the players will try to exploit a rule—as they do all rules—doesn’t mean that you eliminate any rules that people will tempt to exploit from the rule book.)
