This article caught my eye this morning and I believe it's worth a look; it’s an issue that won’t go away anytime soon, concussions have become almost an epidemic in the NHL this season. All you have to do is look down the injury list to see this. Look how many names are currently on the NHL injury list for concussions, it’s staggering. At first glance at this list I counted approximately 18 players out with concussion, I think that list actually grew three from last week. The Penguins alone have three players suffering from Concussions.
Bruce Arthur February 23, 2011 – 10:19 pm ----- It has been eight weeks now. Eight weeks since Victor Hedman smashed Sidney Crosby’s head into the glass in Pittsburgh, which was four days after David Steckel ran his shoulder into Crosby’s temple in the Winter Classic at Heinz Field. Which means that it has been eight weeks since Sidney Crosby played an NHL game.While driving home from my workout this afternoon, the host from the Point on XM-204 NHL Home Ice was talking about Sidney Crosby’s concussion and basically saying the longer Sidney Crosby is out with this concussion the more likely he won’t be back this season, we are running out of time for his return, there is roughly what six weeks left to the season. Which is a shame you have the top player in the NHL an elite player sitting on the shelf and might not play again this season because he has a head injury.
And that should make anybody who cares about hockey nauseous. It should give them a headache. It should cause sleepless nights. In other words, it should make them feel like they have suffered a concussion.
It’s not that Sidney Crosby, as a person, is more important than Marc Savard or David Perron or Matthew Lombardi or Peter Mueller, all of whom have missed most or all of the NHL season with post-concussion symptoms. It’s not that his symptoms are necessarily worse. There were 33 concussions reported in the NHL through Dec. 1. There are a lot of guys sitting in dark and quiet rooms, these days.
But Crosby is different, because he is Sidney Crosby. He is the best player in the world; he is one of the two players in the league who actually have the ability to transcend the league. And since Alexander Ovechkin has spent the season being a more physical Brad Richards — another guy who has the curtains drawn, at the moment — Crosby was, until early January, standing alone.
And then came David Steckel and Hedman, neither of whom were fined or suspended for making contact with Crosby’s head from behind. And as the days stretch out, you start to wonder and worry about what comes next.
The precise severity of Crosby’s concussion has not been made public. The Penguins have said he needs to go symptom-free for 10 days before being cleared, and that has apparently not happened. On Jan. 24 he told reporters in Pittsburgh, “People say mild concussion, but I don’t know that there really is such thing. The good thing is the past four to five days have been pretty good, but that’s not to say symptoms won’t come back.”
That was a month ago, now. Then he talked about headaches, and not knowing what triggered them — light, noise, exertion, it all seemed a little random — and that he was happy to be able to drive a car again. Just 10 days ago he returned from some time away from the team, with his parents, and when Pittsburgh Tribune beat reporter Rob Rossi mentioned he didn’t have much of a tan, Crosby said, “I didn’t want to stay [outside] too long because that might bring on [headaches].”
There has been speculation that he is done for the season, but we won’t know until the season is over. So all we really know is that Crosby’s symptoms have not gone away. Or that if they have, they’ve always come back. And that the vacuum of information coming out of Pittsburgh is like the quiet between bombings.
And the NHL should be terrified. Crosby was having his finest season; he is still fifth in the league in scoring despite missing 20 games. And the greatest difference between Crosby and every other hockey player is not his skating, or his hands, or his size. It is his neural capacity to control his skating, to direct his hands, to see the ice, to think the game with a fine edge. It is his brain.
So many players have never been the same after suffering a concussion this severe, or at least, that has lasted this long. Eric Lindros, Paul Kariya, Pat LaFontaine, Keith Primeau, Savard, on and on. Not every concussion opens a window to more concussions. Maybe this is the only brain injury Sidney Crosby will ever suffer, and he will fulfill the promise of being a generation-defining player. He is just 23.
But either way, he will now play the rest of his career in greater danger of a second concussion, and a third. The worst-case scenario, of course, is that he becomes Lindros all over again. Crosby’s much better at protecting himself, but in a league where those two hits are deemed acceptable, it might not matter. When he decried such hits back in January, Crosby said, “when you get hit like that there’s nothing you can do, there’s no way you can protect yourself.”
And yet they went unpunished.
I think the NHL could prevent more of the head injuries if the NHL took a more serious approach to disciplining the offenders that are laying out this types of questionable hits to the head and started protecting the players, maybe the numbers would go down. Until the NHL front office gets serious about protecting the players on the ice you will continue to see an injury list full of players suffering from concussions and post concussion syndrome.
