Connor McDavid, concussions, the Olympics and player safety

Aloha.

As my podcasting partner Jeff Marek says, “Hockey is everywhere.” So it was in Hawaii, where I spent the last two weeks on our honeymoon. (And thanks for the kind words and the suggestions on stuff to do, and where to stuff our faces. Jurassic Park helicopter ride, podcast guided Road To Hana and mai tai’s with passion fruit foam for the wins.)

While we didn’t have a Wayne Gretzky “Waikiki Hockey” sighting, we were surprised at how many Los Angeles Kings and Anaheim Ducks games were on at bars and around hotels. At our hotel in Maui, NHL Network (!!!) was the de facto channel on the bar’s main television. Not ESPN. NHL Network. It was pretty cool, as it was cool to meet some of the puckheads on vacation as well. So we fully expect Hawaiian expansion by 2025.

Thanks to the glorious staff on this blog – Leahy, Neale, Cooper and Lambert – I was able to keep up with the NHL and all of its usual crap (or in the case of John Gibson, unusual crap), including three player safety issues I feel deserved some comment.

Connor McDavid vs. concussion spotters

When McDavid was pulled off the rink by NHL concussion spotters – after banging his chin on the ice, not suffering a concussion and then being forced into the protocol, missing an Edmonton Oilers 5-on-3 power play in the process – something absolutely fascinating happened:

The 19-year-old future face of the NHL spoke in direct opposition with the 29-year-old current face of the NHL.

The NHL’s increased attention on concussions, concussion spotting, and concussion protocols, rests on three pillars: Sidney Crosby’s prolonged absence and criticism of the League in Jan. 2011, which ratcheted up Rule 48 enforcement and broadened the scope of the new rule; the concussion lawsuit filed by former players, which is still percolating in a Minnesota court en route to potential class action status; and the Dennis Wideman attack on an NHL linesman last season, the primary reason we have concussion spotters now.

Crosby’s career in the NHL bridges this era of Player Safety: Not only the creation of the department, but in the League’s continuing push for more concussion oversight. It is, without question, a league with fewer catastrophic hits than the one Crosby debuted in.

McDavid entered a League last season that, by comparison to Crosby’s early years, is attempting to bubble-wrap its players, and for good reasons in the NHL’s eyes: There are still predatory hits; there is still a door open to litigation based on presumed negligence; and players and teams can’t be trusted to put a player’s health ahead of points in the standings, so the NHL has to serve up concussion spotters as watchdogs.

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Look, we know the system has its flaws: Seemingly selective enforcement, at least in suspension duration; an inconsistent protocol, as Mark Spector noted it’s hard to square McDavid going out for a chin-bump and two guys fighting stay in the game; and in McDavid’s case, what amounts to a misdiagnosis from someone who isn’t on the ice. But I think Barry Petchesky, staunch player safety guy, said it best:

“This is the rare case where a league’s self-interest requires that it act in the interests of its players’ health, and that it do so in circumstances where the players can’t be trusted to do it themselves. Everyone wins here, even if no one is quite happy about it.”

McDavid’s is going to be the loudest voice in the NHL within three years, maybe sooner. So it’s more than a little interesting that his first substantial criticism of the league was that it was too safe, years after a young Sidney Crosby gained infamy for saying it wasn’t safe enough. Does he eventually lead a generational pushback against draconian player safety measures? Does he agree with teammate Pat Maroon that the NHL has taken “a man’s game” and neutered it?

The Concussion Lawsuit

The concussion lawsuit against the NHL chugs along, with its usual smoke stack of embarrassing Colin Campbell emails and various other pollutants.

But this caught my eye, from Rick Westhead: Canadian journalist D’Arcy Jenish, an author whose work has appeared in the Globe & Mail and MacLean’s among other places, was paid $39,000 by lawyers for the former NHL players to testify against the League.

A snippet:

See, this is what makes me mental about the plaintiffs’ case: The requirement to rewrite history or, sparing that, dramatically shift one’s opinion in order to align with the notion that the NHL (and only the NHL) has been negligent on player safety through the decades.

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You catch that part about the NHL “prioritizing profits over its players” due to its refusal to eliminate fighting from hockey?

Here’s Jenish during his Reddit AmA from Nov. 2013:

I highly doubt that, in a span of three years, a lifelong hockey guy who argued for fighting having “a place” in the game – for the sake of player safety, no less! – suddenly finding Hockey Jesus and believing the NHL just keeps it around for profits.

But maybe he had 39,000 good reasons to do so.

The Olympics

Look, there are plenty of reasons for the NHL not to send its players to the 2018 Pyeongchang Olympics, and plenty of evidence that continued Olympic participation doesn’t actually benefit the NHL economically. (Even if it enriches the lives of anyone on Earth with a scintilla of admiration for the sport itself.)

But where you lose me, Gary Bettman, is when you try to frame this decision as one that concerns the wellbeing of the players. Here’s Bettman, from the Board of Governors meeting:

“There are a lot of owners, a lot of clubs, over the years that have been very concerned about what Olympic participation does to the season. What it does to players in terms of injuries. Not just those that go, but having a compressed schedule can make players more tired, more wear and tear on them, the potential for injury is greater,” Bettman said. “I think after doing five of these, I don’t know. I think ‘fatigue’ might be a word.”

So the League that had its star players participate in a made-up preseason tournament with made-up teams in September, and watched several players suffer injuries in that tournament, is now concerned about the Olympics’ deleterious affect on player safety?

OH WAIT THAT’S RIGHT THE NHL PROFITS FROM ONE AND NOT THE OTHER.

Seriously, Gary, you have a case against the Olympics. It’s a logical one, standing in contrast with the (undeniably compelling) ‘all the feels’ argument on the other side, that wants the NHL in the Olympics, no matter the venue nor the circumstances.

But when you have your players in the World Cup, soon in a Ryder Cup, in the All-Star Game (facing suspensions if they don’t play), flying to Europe, doing the outdoor game dog-and-pony shows annually, you lose the right to claim the Olympics are any more of an extraordinary injury risk than what the League currently demands of its players. It’s a non-starter argument.

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Anyway, it’s good to be back. And just in time to see the Vegas Golden Knights still manage to run head first into a trademark dispute months after Bill Foley found out you don’t get to name your team anything you’d like for $500 million.

Based on his mastery of trademarks, we’re starting to get the feeling he might have been the owner of McDowell’s at some point.

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Greg Wyshynski is a writer for Yahoo Sports. Contact him at puckdaddyblog@yahoo.com or find him on Twitter. His book, TAKE YOUR EYE OFF THE PUCK, is available on Amazon and wherever books are sold.