Another Player dead

[X. Benedict]

I think the advocates and the emasculators of our society are taking the limited findings they have and spreading them way too far. Your post, Weave reveals it. They are finding signs of CTE in kids who only played high school ball. I played high school ball, and wrestled, and played rugby in college, and crushed beer cans on my forehead, and still hit my head on ###### all the time. I'm sure that if some science geek looked at my brain, he would find signs of CTE. But I'm not depressed, self medicating with alcohol, or engaging in auto erotic asphyxiation, which is how one of these guys actually died. Neither is Rob Ray, Mike Robitaille, Danny Gare, or any of the other guys we regularly see associated with the franchise who played professional hockey. The only way to eliminate the risk is to eliminate the sport, which the panty waist, emasculators would love.

 

You know what's bad for your brain? Living. As we live, we age. As we age, things break down. I liken this whole CTE debate to soft tissue injuries in the spine. Some people call it "degenerative disc disease". You know what it really is? Aging. As we age, our spine breaks down. If we live hard and don't lift heavy objects with our knees, it breaks down faster. When it hurts really bad, people self medicate with alcohol, especially if people have underlying mental health issues. Lets do a research project on the spines of professional athletes - I bet they show signs of degenerative disc disease - so should we ban lifting?

 

You can't remove all risk of injury from the game without destroying the game. Improve the equipment where you can, improve treatment to help them recover, but don't remove fighting and think it will have any substantial impact on the incidence of CTE. The study involving CTE in high school football players reveals the players will have CTE before they are old enough to fight, and it may not even come from playing hockey. As the multitudes of players who aren't out drinking their faces off and hanging themselves demonstrate, CTE as presently understood is not an accurate predictor of the long term health of players.

 

Hockey will always have contact and potentially violent collisions.There are sensible measures that can be taken to address scientific findings. Has wearing helmets really affected your enjoyment of the game. Heck, when I was a kid we didn't wear helmets mostly because our heroes didn't. Is Milan Lucic or Cal Clutterbuck less tough because he plays in a era with helmets?

 

Juniors and the NHL have gotten rid of head hits....has that really affected your enjoyment of the game?

 

There are clearly sensible common sense things the league can do that will seem commonplace in ten years.

If you love the game now, you still will.

 

Emasculating? Depriving men of their masculine identity by using some common sense? Nah....

 

 

 

 

 

They haven't done the studies yet, but when they do I am confident things like open ice hits and hits along the boards by 200 lb men going 30 MPH impart far more trauma to the brain than a fight with a guy where only a few punches actually land.

 

This is why I think most dirty hits are more dangerous than any fight.

[Taro T]

Quite an acticle on Derek Boogaard and his C.T.E.

 

http://www.nytimes.c...nted=all?src=tp

 

Gotta wonder if Barnaby might have it too.

If Barnaby's issues are fighting related, they date back to him being a very young man. Watch some of his mid-90's fights; the guy is smiling DURING the fight. I'm sorry, but that just ain't right.

 

I don't care how tough you are, if you can SMILE as you're getting popped in the noggin, you've got a screw loose.

I have commented in this forum before that the events of this past Summer (3 enforcers dead) have resulted in a lot of internal conflict for me. I am still very much entertained by a good hockey fight. And I still harbor an old school sense of how teams deal with on ice issues.

 

I changed the bolded part to reflect where i am at right now. I am very aware that these brain injuries aren't limited to just the Derek Boogards and Bob Proberts of the league. But I still think there is a place for the spontaneous outbreak of fisticuffs that happens among players that actually have a direct hockey-related value on the team. And, maybe I am fooling myself, but I am working under the assumption that smaller guys that don't focus their entire exsistance on learning how to more effectively hurt others aren't going to be as damaging in a fight as the Derek Boogards of the world. I think we are already seeing a pretty significant change in rosters that is reflecting this idea. The super heavyweight is becoming scarce as most teams can't afford to give up roster space for a guy who plays 4-6 shifts per game. Guys who can actually contribut like Milan Lucic, Scott Hartnell, and Ryan Clowe are rapidly replacing them. I think you'll see less fighting as a result, but the fights will be entertaining, less prone to injury, and more related to actual on-ice events instead of the staged garbage we watched for about 15 years.

And that is why every time I hear a Mike Milbury type cry out for just letting guys grab other guys near the boards to prevent the massive head shots that are occuring I cringe. Letting the seriously slow players like Milbury was get to 'clutch and grab' in a 'rare' occassion or 2 will bring us back to the lousy hockey we saw prior to the lockout. Was there EVER a worse final than Tampa - Calgary? (Yeah, Buffalo - Dallas was pretty brutal too, but darn it we were in it, and if they'd've called the clutching and grabbing I'd trust Dom far more than 'Ol Bats in His' Belfour to win a shooters battle even though they had the better shooters.)

 

Far and away the biggest reason guys like Peters are no longer in the league is they can't skate with the guys they're trying to intimidate. If you let them grab them / hook them / otherwise restrain them, then they CAN skate with them. (It's real forking easy to waterski.) I don't know if the advocates of the 'good old days' are pining for their own glory moments jumping on the back of someone that was already impeded by a teammate or if they're frustrated that their progeny won't (CAN'T) follow in their footsteps or if it's a combination, but either way they AREN'T advocating for a fast paced exciting game in their diatribes.

 

Great post. I have the same internal conflict. About a month ago I watched some video of some of those Peca hits that I used to so loudly cheer and was kind of ashamed.

I just read the NYT piece. Very compelling. I've generally been pretty adamant about banning headshots but less so about banning fighting (i.e. I've felt on balance that it should be banned but without the strong feelings I have about headshots). After reading that piece I'm definitely, and emphatically, ready to get rid of the "super heavyweight" role in hockey. Not sure what the best way to do it is IF we want to retain the ability of guys like Lucic, Gaustad, etc. to get in the occasional scrap, but it could be as simple as suspending anyone who gets in a fight who doesn't also average X minutes of ice time per game -- and perhaps suspending the fighter's coach as well. No one should get funneled into the life that Boogard led.

 

...

 

And, respectfully, the football studies are really neither here nor there. Football is a much different game, with both practices and games consisting of lining up, digging cleats into grass and repeatedly bashing heads on heads. Of course the incidence is going to be much higher in football -- and the troubling question is whether there is anything that can be done about it, since it's really the essence of the game, or at least of interior line play, which is an essential part of the game. The essence of hockey is skating, passing, shooting, checking, defending and goaltending. It doesn't require head shots or fighting.

As alluded to above, continuing to put an emphasis on skating will get rid of the Peters of this world. There will still be the odd Lucic that makes it through and even the odder Boulton (by FAR the fastest pure goon I've ever seen); but the enforcer's role will continue to be minimized in the league and when some teams don't have a true exclusive only goon (much less 4-5 of them), then other teams will reorder their priorities in what they want from that #12-13 forward / #7 D-man.

 

If skating is at a premium and you know all 18 guys you are facing can fly, you might think twice about pulling up a Val James.

 

 

Hockey will always have contact and potentially violent collisions.There are sensible measures that can be taken to address scientific findings. Has wearing helmets really affected your enjoyment of the game. Heck, when I was a kid we didn't wear helmets mostly because our heroes didn't. Is Milan Lucic or Cal Clutterbuck less tough because he plays in a era with helmets?

 

Juniors and the NHL have gotten rid of head hits....has that really affected your enjoyment of the game?

 

There are clearly sensible common sense things the league can do that will seem commonplace in ten years.

If you love the game now, you still will.

 

Emasculating? Depriving men of their masculine identity by using some common sense? Nah....

 

 

 

 

 

 

This is why I think most dirty hits are more dangerous than any fight.

According to guys that 'know' how concussions occur and how to treat them, hockey helmets don't prevent / alleviate / lessen concussions. (Yeah, I was surprised to hear that as well.) Hockey helmets reduce lacerations and skull fractures. From what I have been told by experts, the most severe cause of a concussion (at least in hockey) is a 'whiplash effect' wherein the head gets twisted around and the brain traverses the curved path at a different velocity than the skull it sits in and bangs against the skull. A helmet can't protect against a twisting (axis changing) hit. Nor can it help much with a severe velocity changing hit. (For an example of both, consider the hit Neil through on Drury. Drury's head twisted rapidly when the elbow hit it; it also stopped moving abruptly when it hit the ice.)

[shrader]

According to guys that 'know' how concussions occur and how to treat them, hockey helmets don't prevent / alleviate / lessen concussions. (Yeah, I was surprised to hear that as well.) Hockey helmets reduce lacerations and skull fractures. From what I have been told by experts, the most severe cause of a concussion (at least in hockey) is a 'whiplash effect' wherein the head gets twisted around and the brain traverses the curved path at a different velocity than the skull it sits in and bangs against the skull. A helmet can't protect against a twisting (axis changing) hit. Nor can it help much with a severe velocity changing hit. (For an example of both, consider the hit Neil through on Drury. Drury's head twisted rapidly when the elbow hit it; it also stopped moving abruptly when it hit the ice.)

 

So short of something inside the skull, there's no piece of equipment that's ever going to stop those. That's exactly why they need to combat these injuries by limiting those kind of hits. Some won't like to hear it, but that's the way it is.

[Eleven]

Mike Robitaille talked this morning about a game in junior where he intentionally broke an opponent's leg. He was contrite about it, but he also had kind of a "part of the game" attitude about it.

 

I believe there's also a story out there about Mike stabbing a fan with a pen when the fan made a wisecrack as Mike was autographing something.

 

Maybe it's Mike (and I don't define a man by how he acted as a kid), maybe it's the culture; maybe that culture has changed since Mike was young, but maybe not.

[Taro T]

So short of something inside the skull, there's no piece of equipment that's ever going to stop those. That's exactly why they need to combat these injuries by limiting those kind of hits. Some won't like to hear it, but that's the way it is.

Correct on all 3 counts.

[korab rules]

If Barnaby's issues are fighting related, they date back to him being a very young man. Watch some of his mid-90's fights; the guy is smiling DURING the fight. I'm sorry, but that just ain't right.

 

I don't care how tough you are, if you can SMILE as you're getting popped in the noggin, you've got a screw loose.

 

And that is why every time I hear a Mike Milbury type cry out for just letting guys grab other guys near the boards to prevent the massive head shots that are occuring I cringe. Letting the seriously slow players like Milbury was get to 'clutch and grab' in a 'rare' occassion or 2 will bring us back to the lousy hockey we saw prior to the lockout. Was there EVER a worse final than Tampa - Calgary? (Yeah, Buffalo - Dallas was pretty brutal too, but darn it we were in it, and if they'd've called the clutching and grabbing I'd trust Dom far more than 'Ol Bats in His' Belfour to win a shooters battle even though they had the better shooters.)

 

Far and away the biggest reason guys like Peters are no longer in the league is they can't skate with the guys they're trying to intimidate. If you let them grab them / hook them / otherwise restrain them, then they CAN skate with them. (It's real forking easy to waterski.) I don't know if the advocates of the 'good old days' are pining for their own glory moments jumping on the back of someone that was already impeded by a teammate or if they're frustrated that their progeny won't (CAN'T) follow in their footsteps or if it's a combination, but either way they AREN'T advocating for a fast paced exciting game in their diatribes.

 

 

 

As alluded to above, continuing to put an emphasis on skating will get rid of the Peters of this world. There will still be the odd Lucic that makes it through and even the odder Boulton (by FAR the fastest pure goon I've ever seen); but the enforcer's role will continue to be minimized in the league and when some teams don't have a true exclusive only goon (much less 4-5 of them), then other teams will reorder their priorities in what they want from that #12-13 forward / #7 D-man.

 

If skating is at a premium and you know all 18 guys you are facing can fly, you might think twice about pulling up a Val James.

 

 

 

According to guys that 'know' how concussions occur and how to treat them, hockey helmets don't prevent / alleviate / lessen concussions. (Yeah, I was surprised to hear that as well.) Hockey helmets reduce lacerations and skull fractures. From what I have been told by experts, the most severe cause of a concussion (at least in hockey) is a 'whiplash effect' wherein the head gets twisted around and the brain traverses the curved path at a different velocity than the skull it sits in and bangs against the skull. A helmet can't protect against a twisting (axis changing) hit. Nor can it help much with a severe velocity changing hit. (For an example of both, consider the hit Neil through on Drury. Drury's head twisted rapidly when the elbow hit it; it also stopped moving abruptly when it hit the ice.)

 

This is why I said you can't eliminate risk without fundamentally changing the game.

 

 

You make a lot of reasonable points here, but the bolded part is a straw man, IMHO. No one is trying to remove all risk of injury. But there is a discrete set of actions (fighting and head shots) that result in a discrete set of terrible consequences. The guardians of the game can and, IMHO, should be trying very hard to reduce the occurrence of those outcomes.

 

And, respectfully, the football studies are really neither here nor there. Football is a much different game, with both practices and games consisting of lining up, digging cleats into grass and repeatedly bashing heads on heads. Of course the incidence is going to be much higher in football -- and the troubling question is whether there is anything that can be done about it, since it's really the essence of the game, or at least of interior line play, which is an essential part of the game. The essence of hockey is skating, passing, shooting, checking, defending and goaltending. It doesn't require head shots or fighting.

 

As for football and hockey being two different beasts, you are right - the hits are much more severe in hockey for the reasons that Taro describes - the speeds are greater and the rotational forces are greater in hockey. Two guys bashing their helmets together from three feet apart is bad for the neck, but really doesn't do much to the skull. Wide receivers and DB's are at greater risk than the linemen.

 

Fighting doesn't carry nearly the risk of brain injury that high velocity hits do - I agree the headshots need to come out of the game, but that doesn't eliminate the risk of brain injuries - they are just as likely be to be caused by legal open ice hits and hits along the boards where the head isn't targeted but still makes contact with the glass.

[That Aud Smell]

From what I have been told by experts, the most severe cause of a concussion (at least in hockey) is a 'whiplash effect' wherein the head gets twisted around and the brain traverses the curved path at a different velocity than the skull it sits in and bangs against the skull. A helmet can't protect against a twisting (axis changing) hit. Nor can it help much with a severe velocity changing hit. (For an example of both, consider the hit Neil through on Drury. Drury's head twisted rapidly when the elbow hit it; it also stopped moving abruptly when it hit the ice.)

This is why I said you can't eliminate risk without fundamentally changing the game.

 

:huh:

 

not sure why neil's hit on drury would prompt you to say that.

 

anyway, no one is talking about eliminating risk; we're talking about reducing it as much as possible. there's going to be an occasional trolley track hit (campbell on umberger) and the legitimate "keep your head up" hit (schaefer on connolly), but the league can and should do what it can to get rid of as much unnecessary risk as possible. IMO, bare knuckle scraps are probably an unnecessary risk.

[NowDoYouBelieve]

This is why I said you can't eliminate risk without fundamentally changing the game.

 

 

 

Two guys bashing their helmets together from three feet apart is bad for the neck, but really doesn't do much to the skull. Wide receivers and DB's are at greater risk than the linemen.

 

 

 

I'm no neurologist, but you should read up on sub-concussive impact. NFL linemen are probably at a greater risk than any other position in any other sport.

[Weave]

Fighting doesn't carry nearly the risk of brain injury that high velocity hits do - I agree the headshots need to come out of the game, but that doesn't eliminate the risk of brain injuries - they are just as likely be to be caused by legal open ice hits and hits along the boards where the head isn't targeted but still makes contact with the glass.

 

I don't think you can make the bolded statement accurately without diving into the research. And I'll add that all high velocity body checks are not alike. . Each and every impact in a fight causes acceleration and deceleration of the head/neck. It has to. The head is the impact point and all of the energy that is transfered is transfered at the head/neck. There are impacts inside of the head involving the brain with every punch landed. Now, is a Phaneuf bodycheck more damaging because of the energy involved? Maybe. It depends. Depends on what? Well, it depends on how much of that energy ends up accelerating/decelerating the brain around versus accelerating other body parts around. Even though it may/may not be a direct hit on the head I'm comfortable surmising that the energy invovled in such a hit is much greater but it may/may not result in brain acceleration/deceleration like a Shawn Thornton punch becuase the brain may or may not be dealing with the energy transfer directly.

 

Bounce your coconut off the ice or glass as a result of the hit and yeah, that's real bad news. That is energy directly transferred to the head. But that isn't the hit itself.

[Weave]

I'm no neurologist, but you should read up on sub-concussive impact. NFL linemen are probably at a greater risk than any other position in any other sport.

 

It is certainly more documented and tested in football.

[korab rules]

:huh:

 

not sure why neil's hit on drury would prompt you to say that.

 

anyway, no one is talking about eliminating risk; we're talking about reducing it as much as possible. there's going to be an occasional trolley track hit (campbell on umberger) and the legitimate "keep your head up" hit (schaefer on connolly), but the league can and should do what it can to get rid of as much unnecessary risk as possible. IMO, bare knuckle scraps are probably an unnecessary risk.

 

Because my point was removing fighting will not prevent brain injuries, and removing head shots will not prevent brain injuries. he most dangerous forces are the shearing forces and rotational forces that occur on perfectly legal plays. Attempting to remove those plays (open ice hits and hits along the boards) would fundamentally change the game.

I'm no neurologist, but you should read up on sub-concussive impact. NFL linemen are probably at a greater risk than any other position in any other sport.

 

Sub concussive impacts are nothing compared to the concussive frorces we are talking about. My point in referencing football was to show that CTE isn't an accurate predictor of anything, since the study someone cited showed CTE is high school football players with no other explanation for CTE. There are a whole bunch of advocates who think their research is the answer. The truth is no one has a clue how the brain works - they haven't begun to scratch the surface. And certainly not neurologists. There are a very few concussion clinics who have very limited success treating concussions, but your average neurologist doesn't have the first clue how concussions occur or how to treat them.

[korab rules]

I don't think you can make the bolded statement accurately without diving into the research. And I'll add that all high velocity body checks are not alike. . Each and every impact in a fight causes acceleration and deceleration of the head/neck. It has to. The head is the impact point and all of the energy that is transfered is transfered at the head/neck. There are impacts inside of the head involving the brain with every punch landed. Now, is a Phaneuf bodycheck more damaging because of the energy involved? Maybe. It depends. Depends on what? Well, it depends on how much of that energy ends up accelerating/decelerating the brain around versus accelerating other body parts around. Even though it may/may not be a direct hit on the head I'm comfortable surmising that the energy invovled in such a hit is much greater but it may/may not result in brain acceleration/deceleration like a Shawn Thornton punch becuase the brain may or may not be dealing with the energy transfer directly.

 

Bounce your coconut off the ice or glass as a result of the hit and yeah, that's real bad news. That is energy directly transferred to the head. But that isn't the hit itself.

 

This is all correct - much, much less force in a punch which is attempted to be applied to head - most of which miss or result in glancing blows. Big punches that land impart more of that force, some of which is absorbed by the head and neck like a crumple zone in the car.

 

A big hit carries devastating force, but only a portion transfers to the head. If the glass or ice is involved it can be life threatening.

 

There is obviously a lot of physics involved.

 

My original point when I waded into this thread is CTE is the big buzzword everyone is throwing around, but CTE isn't an accurate predictor of anything. Until scientists can get access to the brains of a much larger portion society, athletes, non-athletes and everyone in between - including people with mental illness and people without it in each group, we are shooting arrows in the dark.

 

Scientists don't have a clue at present - but that never stopped them from pandering for research dollars.

[That Aud Smell]

Because my point was removing fighting will not prevent brain injuries, and removing head shots will not prevent brain injuries. The most dangerous forces are the shearing forces and rotational forces that occur on perfectly legal plays. Attempting to remove those plays (open ice hits and hits along the boards) would fundamentally change the game.

gotcha. i'm not so sure about the bolded part, but i agree that if you removed the umberger and connolly type hits, then you would be fundamentally changing the game (in a way that i would have a difficult time accepting).