Crosby’s concussion, untamed headhunting cast cloud over league
Larry Brooks
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Blog: Slap Shots
STOCKHOLM — The start of a new season implies a fresh start for the NHL, a fresh sheet of ice on which to begin the marathon that will end next June.
Except the league is still stuck in the ruts of head shots, concussions, supplemental discipline and debates about the place of fighting in this 21st Century society that have been constant companions since that day on March 7, 2010, when Matt Cooke took out Marc Savard with a drive-by elbow and was allowed to escape scot-free on technicalities known only to the NHL’s front-office decision makers.
Not to mention the debate about the merits of going to no-touch icing following a gruesome injury sustained by Edmonton defenseman Taylor Fedun in a race with Minnesota’s Eric Nystrom on Friday night.
The way these guys skate now to get to the puck first on icing situations, just imagine the 100-yard dash with a brick wall 15 feet beyond the finish line.
The head blows have just kept on coming throughout a preseason during which VP Brendan Shanahan, who replaced the hopelessly lenient VP Colin Campbell as the league executive in charge of discipline, had handed out nine suspensions through Sunday, a couple to repeat offenders.
The subject of concussions, particularly focused on what we know about them and how much more we do not know about them, has become a predominant issue ever since Sidney Crosby, the league’s most valuable commodity, went down and out with one since Jan. 3.
With the start of a new season at hand, the question regarding No. 87 has turned from one about wondering when (or if) he might return to one about how long he will be able to survive before he is concussed again?
If Crosby is not quite Eric Lindros, who may have been genetically predisposed to incurring the series of concussions that ended his career, there is no reason not to be believe that he will become Pat LaFontaine, whose brilliant career was truncated by the repeated brain injuries he sustained in Buffalo and on Broadway.
The last few years of Lindros’ career, it was all about waiting for the shift it would end. That one season as a Ranger for LaFontaine, it was all about watching for the moment it would end.
It will be impossible to watch Crosby on the ice this year without cringing; simply impossible.
But that’s what passes for entertainment in an NHL that just hasn’t quite figured out how to evolve with a changing world in which the athletes get bigger, the game gets faster and the players are most certainly their own worst enemies.
It’s not that there is necessarily less respect than ever between opponents, no it’s not that in a league whose history is replete with stick-swinging, spearing and bench-clearing brawls. Rather, it’s that the repercussions from mindless acts of violence — and that’s the textbook definition of targeting the head — are so much more severe.