I’ve got nothing this morning. Went to a hockey game last night and saw this guy from the opposing team. I thought it was a good name for a hockey player. Do any of you who go to more than one game a season know if hockey had the same issue with concussions as football? Some of those checks are pretty hard.
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JMG
Oh, hell yes concussions are an issue. Sidney Crosby is just one of the prominent concussion victims who suffered major down time.
Schlemizel
We go to 40-60 hockey games a year, never an NHL one though – that is not hockey. The NHL has not yet recognized their CTE problems but it is coming. There have been some recent deaths (though most have been drug related) that point to brain issues. It is coming & it may lead to the death (finally) of pointless fighting in the game.
Because of the lack of fighting and generally better rule enforcement amateur hockey does not have nearly the number of concussions that football does per capita. The NCAA has already tightened the rules about identifying and treating head trauma so with any luck these kids should be better off than their football playing brothers.
BTW – the NCAA womens championship game will be Sunday at 3PM EST and it will be at least as good as the USA/Canada Olympic contests. Its in Hamden, CT with the semis at 5 & 8 on Friday, those should be excellent games also & very inexpensive. If you want to watch the NCAA will carry a live video feed on their web site. The mens NCAA will be next week & also excellent hockey with very little of the goonball crap you see every night in the NHL.
Mnemosyne
Well, that woke me up — 4.7 earthquake north of Westwood.
rikyrah
I am officially freaked out about that missing plane. If this were a movie, folks would be complaining that it was too ‘out there’.
Ash Can
Yes, concussions happen. With the recent raised awareness regarding head injuries, players are kept out of action until their symptoms are gone, but it’s still a hazard. Whether they happen as often and/or as severely as in the NFL, I’m not sure. And it seems to me that old retired hockey players are more likely to have bad legs than bad heads.But it definitely happens.
CB
Yeah, very much so. CTE and associated illnesses are going to be just as big an issue in pro hockey as the NFL. It’s a combination of advances in equipment, changes in pace and style of play, and the fact that almost everyone is 6′ 200+ nowadays
Tommy
I so want to like hockey, but I just can’t. IMHO it is about the worse sport to see on TV. When I lived in DC the Caps were terrible. I could get tickets right on the glass for next to nothing. I always left thinking a lot of things, like it was the best “live” sport I’d been to, but it just doesn’t seem to translated to TV for me.
Heck on TV the ice looks huge (at least to me). In person it is like they are playing in a phone booth. Live it seems so much faster. Just better. And my gosh those guys are bigger in person then on TV.
I just can’t seem to get into it, and my Blues are pretty good these days.
Ash Can
@Schlemizel: Thanks for the tip on the NCAA games!
CB
“…with very little of the goonball crap you see every night in the NHL.”
Absurd.
Sublime33
In addition to the problem of many of the key players having a history of concussions, these same star players were often targeted for head shots until three or four years ago when the league finally cracked down harder on head shots.
Schlemizel
@Tommy: The glass is the worst place to sit for hockey, particularly for a newbie. Sit up high, preferably near a corner. Sure, you may miss the puck actually going into the net but what you will gain is a vision of how the players move around the space, how they use openings and how they create space. The game slows down as you move away from the ice so that helps too.
Schlemizel
duplicate. I do love the name ‘Blood’ though. Somewhere I have an ‘all-name’ team. If I can find it I will post it
Tommy
@Sublime33: I think what happened to Crosby woke up the NHL. When maybe your best and most popular player misses a ton of time (wasn’t it almost a year) in their prime they had to figure something wasn’t working right.
Ash Can
@Tommy: Watching in person makes a HUGE difference. Not only is it easier to see the puck, but since you can see the whole ice surface you can follow the entire play as it unfolds, each time. When I’m watching on TV I’m always getting antsy because I can’t see the point, the late man, the line change, etc.
Suffern ACE
@rikyrah: it’s kind of like playing clue. No one knows why Professor Plum would use a lead pipe in the kitchen. It’s difficult to believe he would. But since the other boxes were almost all checked, the players will start shouting crazy things. Might as well join them.
JPL
@Mnemosyne: Happy St. Pat’s day.
VOR
Yes, CTE is an issue in hockey too. Read the tragic story of Derek Boogaard.
Amir Khalid
If Mr Blood has a teammate named Iron, they should always sit together.
patrick II
NHL Hockey has a terrible problem with concussions. The NHL encourages fighting, and every team has a “goon” meant to be used as an enforcer to protect his teammates by being the toughest guy on the ice. As a result these goons get in a lot of fights — often against each other. Many of the retired enforcers have had terrible histories of illness and death and some death by suicide.
And what is particularly sad about it is that the fighting is not a necessary part of the sport — it is done strictly to increase the gate. If you watched hockey at the Olympics you would have seen many of the same players — but little or no fighting. Same guys but different rules and different refs.
I don’t watch NHL hockey.
c u n d gulag
“Some of those checks are pretty hard.”
And so are some of the Russians, Swedes, Canadians, and Americans.
I’ll be here all week, folks!
Try the roast beef special.
And don’t forget to tip your bar and wait staff!!!!!
Tommy
@Ash Can: The seeing the puck, plus how a play unfolds on the ice (usually outside of the TV shots you get) was a huge thing for me. At least with the NFL, cause there is so much time between a play and just time where nothing is happening, they can pull back to a wide shot to show how a play developed. I find that doesn’t happen much with hockey.
I am also one of the causal hockey fans that doesn’t like the fighting. I like the large rink in international hockey and honestly I find (like with tennis) watching women play more then the men.
Eric U.
I’m not watching NHL until the words, “that was a good clean hit” are banned from the game. There are players that specialize in “good clean hits,” and they dispense concussions. Not sure who thinks that’s a good idea, I can’t be the only one that would enjoy it if it was actually a game and not interrupted by fights and concussions
geg6
CTE is a major concern in hockey and, being from Pittsburgh and having watched Sydney Crosby’s long slow recovery from concussion, it is being taken seriously by the Pens, if not the NHL. It doesn’t hurt that the owner is a former player either. The whole issue has had major coverage in the local media for quite a while. Another issue is that it’s Pittsburgh, where CTE probably got its first big press with Mike Webster’s tragic death.
As a long time hockey and football fan, my own impression is that football players probably have a much higher risk than hockey players in that they take many more hits than hockey players do, especially in practice. That’s just my impression though. I could be completely off base.
GHayduke (formerly lojasmo)
Beginning my third week of treatment. The closest it will get is a game of Am. Volleyball.
evolved beyond the fist mistermix
@Amir Khalid: He had one named “Stone” but I didn’t get a picture of them together.
Downpuppy
Hockey, in addition to the concussions (which currently has a big lawsuit) seems prone to the sudden cataclysm, like Normand Leveille or Travis Roy, where one headfirst slam & they’re crippled for life.
At least they’re not systematically crippling each other on every play. Collisions happen, but they’re not the object of the game.
JPL
@Mnemosyne: It appears that it was downgraded to 4.4 but felt over a wide area. How close are you to Westwood?
raven
@JPL: My brother is in Sherman Oaks and it woke him up.
rikyrah
I bought Peanut some St. Patrick’s Day stuff to wear with her school uniform.
She was like, ‘ Auntie, what do I say if they say I’m not Irish?’
Without missing a beat, I told her to tell them that you are part Irish – compliments of slavery. Told her to say it just like that.
raven
Is someone going to do a March Madness pool or has this place totally degenerated into communist sports?
c u n d gulag
@rikyrah:
And while we sit here in this country bitching about our CIA, which can see a hair on a mosquito’s ass from 100 miles up in space, and listen and store everything anyone says or writes, but the stupid MFers can’t find a fucking missing passenger jet with 239 people on board.
The CIA!
HA!
What it good for.
Absolutely nothin’!
SAY IT AGAIN, Y’ALL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Suffern ACE
@c u n d gulag: now you sound like China. “Malaysia and the US are dragging their feet over locating the plane.” Look, China. It’s not our plane. Secondly, we know you have stolen all the technology our corporations have developed. Go find it yourself.
MikeJ
@c u n d gulag: It’s a big ocean.Even if you know sort of where to look, it’s still really, really big.
Amir Khalid
@c u n d gulag:
Speaking of which … Well, words fail me.
JPL
@c u n d gulag: The story just keeps getting stranger. The last communication may or may not have happened before the transmitter was turned off. When I wake in the morning, I check the latest news but the latest news keeps changing.
Tommy
@MikeJ: That was the best thing I heard from a talking head/expert. One guy said it is a big plane, why can’t we find it? The other dude was like you are correct it is a large plane. But the ocean is kind of pretty large as well.
Chaplain Weasle
I have TBIs (yeah, plural for more fun) and its very coomon in hockey… a sad case I know of is Derek Boogaard… a good player, a goodguy who was a sweetheart to people off ice – he began having symptoms of concussion syndrome or whatever – horrible headaches etc – and died from blood alcohol poisioning w/ codiene in his system… he was just trying to get rid of the fucking headache. Sad. Kyria is another player I really respect and looked up to who got a career ending TBI.
At least the NHL is handling it better I think… it seems in hockey ppl are aware of what they are getting into…
NotMax
The Flying Irishman just ending on TCM.
Never seen it before. Douglas ‘Wrong Way’ Corrigan starring as himself (and he’s no threat insofar as acting goes to even the rawest Hollywood wannabe – this film was the entirety of his silver screen career). Laughably overblown, obviously quickly cranked out production about his life and flight across the Atlantic.
Tuned in part-way through. Gotta make a mental note to watch it when it next appears. Head-shakingly lame depiction of true events.
SiubhanDuinne
@rikyrah:
Perfect! Remind Peanut that a few years ago when POTUS and FLOTUS visited his ancestral home in Ireland, everything was all Barack O’Bama!
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
@Amir Khalid: Isn’t the media amazing? This was not the Onion.
Splitting Image
As I recall, concussions began to get talked about in 1996 when Brett Lindros (Eric’s younger brother) retired at the age of 21 after playing only 51 NHL games. Eric had a few concussions over his career as well.
That said, they are definitely an issue, largely because of fans’ and the league’s celebration of dirty playing. Bobby Clarke was considered a hero for slashing a Soviet player’s ankle in the 1972 summit series, for example. If concussions are possible in that kind of climate, you can be sure that they will become a problem sooner or later.
Suffern ACE
@Amir Khalid: the unserious news anchor asks the unserious History channel host for context. In our next segment, Chumley from Pawn Stars asks Ray from Storage Wars Texas if the plane might be in a 10×12 locker in Austin.
Gin & Tonic
@Amir Khalid: I think Don Lemon jumped the shark quite a while ago.
Elizabelle
@rikyrah:
I’m glad you brought the missing plane up, because it’s 239 souls on board.
I wonder if it did land somewhere. It’s been MIA so long; it’s human to hope that the passengers still have their lives and a future. Although the flying at 45,000 feet is disturbing.
If it is in the ocean, it could take months to find it.
Such a strange situation, because as soon as we’re assured some supposition is outlandish, additional facts emerge and it becomes one possibility, however remote.
dmsilev
@Amir Khalid: The perils of 24-hour news in the absence of new information. You have to fill the time with something, anything, and eventually you start scraping the bottom of the barrel. Some rather odd things get scraped up.
If the search space doesn’t somehow get narrowed down from those huge arcs derived from the satellite coms, I have my doubts that the plane will ever get found. That’s a huge huge haystack to try to find one needle.
Omnes Omnibus
@SiubhanDuinne: There is a (possibly apocryphal) story that, in the ’50s or early ’60s, Sammy Davis, Jr., was approached for a role in a film where the character was a Black Irishman.
Pluky
@rikyrah: But what do you say if the “compliments of slavery” Irish ancestry is more Orange than Green, as is my case?
Tommy
@Splitting Image: I have to admit I am stunned that it seems the major sports have seemed to just find out concussions are a bad thing. My grandfather was a medical doctor and in the 70s told my parents I shouldn’t play football. Cause you know getting hit in the head wasn’t a good thing.
Heck I was also the kid that fell out of trees. Fell off my bike. Did stupid stuff. Even in the 70s when I had a few concussions doctors took them very seriously. You know monitoring me for days. Making sure I didn’t sleep for an extended period of time. Testing my memory.
I don’t know, again it just seems strange to me it is like we just discovered concussions are dangerous.
Pluky
@Elizabelle: My worry is that it’s waiting under camoflage, on some islet in the Indian Ocean, for the heat to drop off, before commencing part two of the mission.
Gin & Tonic
@Elizabelle: If it is in the ocean, it could take months to find it.
If it went down in the southern reaches of the Indian Ocean, I’ll bet good money it’s never found. Maybe in a year or two some pieces will wash ashore in Perth or something, but people really underestimate how much nothing there is in the Southern Ocean, and how deep it is.
Chaplain Weasle
@VOR: Thanks for mentioning…
I think he is what woke up the owners of NHL teams & got ppl to make sure “it won’t happen again” … but its sad it had to happen to him @ all… its sad it takes a death to get ppl to notice shit that is obvious.
Also I said “NHL” When I ment QMJHL, AHL, ETC. (Mindfog like hell today)
Boogaard’s family sued the NHL, so maybe having them loose $$$ will put it in a language they can understand.
Tommy
@Gin & Tonic: How about it. I pulled out my Atlas, cause yeah I still use books :). I didn’t know that area of the world that well (mainly the seas and oceans). Took out a ruler to measure mileage and my gosh that is a lot of space to search. And if any of the news stories are correct that it flew for hours after the last communications, well I am not that good at math but you are talking millions of square miles.
Cervantes
@Amir Khalid: And you were embarrassed about that bomoh.
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
@Pluky: Remember that it’s much easier to put a plane that size down in a remote place than it is to get it back up.
c u n d gulag
I wonder if where that jet disappeared, isn’t on the exact opposite side of the Earth from “The Bermuda Triangle?”
Maybe that jet’s floating in the Caribbean? ;-)
Cervantes
@rikyrah: (1) In some places the point of school uniforms is to have the kids not worry so much about what clothes and accessories they’re able to (or have to) wear; and (2) I agree completely that giving in to social pressure on St. Patrick’s Day is in no way comparable to slavery and the legacy thereof.
Elizabelle
@Gin & Tonic:
Maybe they would find something floating in the sea lanes, weeks or months from now.
@Pluky: And did the passengers survive the flight? How would you keep a planeful of passengers and cabin crew quiet?
And could the mission have just plain been proving that one could swipe a passenger jet, in that part of the world, at least?
Egypt lost a lot of tourism after the massacre at the pyramids, and then the Egypt Air suicidal co-pilot episode after that …
Gin & Tonic
@Pluky: My worry is that it’s waiting under camoflage, on some islet in the Indian Ocean
“Islets” with a runway long enough to land a 777 are very few. And if it has a runway that long, it has to have some cell service. Guaranteed that plane was carrying at least 250 cell phones. At least one would have to ping something.
Elizabelle
@a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q):
So maybe you would plan to move the jet, in pieces if necessary, by ship?
Cervantes
@dmsilev:
“Something, anything” that requires no serious work, or thinking, or action, on anyone’s part.
Without this caveat, there’d be a thousand more useful things they could discuss.
SiubhanDuinne
@Omnes Omnibus:
Ha! Funny!
When I got divorced, I kept my ex-husband’s last name (mostly because I was known professionally by that name and didn’t want the fuss that would have accompanied a change) — anyhow, it is a name that ends in a vowel and sounds Italian, but in fact it is completely Irish. There was even a mayor of Dublin sharing the same surname. My husband always maintained that it was a “Black Irish” name, stemming from the Spanish sailors who were shipwrecked off the Irish coast during the Armada, and who passed their names and dark coloration down to their descendants.* It seems to be a popular theory, but I think it’s been pretty well discredited.
*(Iberia to Ibernia, so to speak.)
Tommy
@Elizabelle: Just a little thought I had. After 9/11 when the doors to the cockpit were improved (assume that happened on this plane as well — but I don’t know) I had the thought, well that also means the passengers or other flight crew can’t get in there if the pilots try to do something. Like fly it into a building or something else.
Elizabelle
@Gin & Tonic:
If the plane did not crash at sea, I am thinking that the passengers were disabled somehow and that electronics were collected. Although what do you do about electronics in the luggage hold?
It is Mr. Plum with the candlestick stuff, isn’t it?
But it’s not fun, because you had so many people on that flight, and their relatives and friends don’t know what to believe at this point.
Elizabelle
@Tommy:
Yeah. Works both ways, doesn’t it?
Gin & Tonic
@Elizabelle: Maybe they would find something floating in the sea lanes,
There aren’t “sea lanes” in the Southern Ocean. There is some shipping of iron ore out of Perth northwest to Asia, but not that much, and it tends to go reasonably close to land (Indonesia.) That path from South Africa east to Australia has pretty much nothing.
Mnemosyne
@rikyrah:
Not necessarily always slavery — Henry Louis Gates Jr. thinks his Irish ancestry may have come from an on-the-sly relationship, but not necessarily with his ancestor’s owner. (That article is from 2010 — not sure if he’s found additional information since then.)
When the Irish first came here in large numbers, they were pretty despised by other whites, so it wasn’t that uncommon for them to intermarry (or live together as spouses if actual marriage was outlawed) with recently freed slaves.
There was a really amazing episode of Dr. Gates’ show where Wanda Sykes found out that her family had been free for pretty much all of American history — her great-etc.-grandmother was a white Irish indentured servant who had a child with an African slave, which meant that her child was born free since slavery was transmitted through the mother, and the family managed to stay free through the Civil War.
(What can I say, I find genealogy fascinating! ;-)
Tommy
@Elizabelle: It does. On 9/11 you had multiple terrorist on each flight. All you need is one pilot. Maybe he/she is a zealot. Maybe you kidnap his family. But all you need is one and they are basically in a place nobody can get to them.
I am not remotely saying this happened. Just noting as you said, “it works both ways.”
Elizabelle
@Mnemosyne:
What are you hearing locally about any quake damage or aftereffects?
Elizabelle
@Gin & Tonic:
Didn’t know that. Thanks.
Cervantes
@Omnes Omnibus:
This paragraph …
… is the first in the introduction to How the Irish Became White, by Noel Ignatiev (1995).
Here from that same book is a passage from Noel’s acknowledgements:
Just Some Fuckhead, Thought Leader
Fortunately, hockey players don’t have brains so there is nothing to damage.
Omnes Omnibus
@Tommy: As Emo Phillips said, “It’s a small world, but I’d hate to have to paint it.”
Mnemosyne
@Elizabelle:
There probably won’t be much — anything under a 5 is pretty minor, especially with our building codes and all the prep people do. Some of my co-workers will have a busy week inspecting our art collection and making sure nothing got invisibly damaged.
Mnemosyne
@Cervantes:
I assume the author means that socially a black woman can’t be acknowledged as the mother of a white child, because biologically it’s totally possible.
Gin & Tonic
@Tommy: The landless area of the Indian Ocean can, very roughly, fit a rectangle about 5,000 miles east-west (Durban, South Africa to Perth, Western Australia) and 4,000 miles north-south (Sri Lanka down to the Kerguelen Islands.
Cervantes
@Omnes Omnibus: He’s a funny guy! Saw him live some years ago; he brought the roof down.
Tommy
@Gin & Tonic: I normally don’t follow news stories like this. Not heartless, but just not my cup of tea. Much how I feel about the “hot white women goes missing.” I have to admit I can’t stop reading and thinking about it. If I found myself on a news site and there is a story about WWIII breaking out and a new theory on what happened to the plane, my first click is on the plane story :).
Throw in I am a science fiction fan (no I don’t think aliens played a role) and like Lost, well I am hooked …..
Cervantes
@Mnemosyne:
Could it be that somehow you’ve missed the author’s primary point? It’s clearly discernible from just the first line of the quoted paragraph: there is no biological definition of “race.”
Ruckus
Live about 10 miles straight line from the center of the quake and it woke me up. A little remembrance from 20 yrs ago. That one was about 5 miles straight line for me.
As these things go not a big deal, no noticeable damage but then it really wasn’t that big. Enough to get your attention, that’s about it. Dogs barked, didn’t hear a car alarm.
Sublime33
@Tommy:
Concussions are much more wide spread than Sidney Crosby. Chris Pronger and Marion Hossa spent weeks in a literal dark room recovering from concussions. Daniel Sedin and Jonathan Toews missed weeks. And these are just the first line Olympic starters for their respective countries. Then there are dozens of David Bollands and Marc Savards out there as well who suffered with the dreaded “upper body injury”.
dollared
@Schlemizel: Totally agreed. The only season tickets I’ve ever owned for any sport were three years of the University of Minnesota hockey team. And of course, it was really worth it when UMD and Brett Hull came into town and stomped Minnesota. Every time.
Mnemosyne
@Cervantes:
So you agree with me that the “well-known phenomenon” is a social problem where people refuse to acknowledge that a black woman can be the mother of a white child?
dollared
@Tommy: This. Live, you can see the weak side defenseman sneaking down into the zone for the cross rink pass. Or you can see which players have the ability to anticipate play and get the puck just where it needs to be.
Mario Lemiuex live – it was a like a masters level course in geometry and planetary motion. Never saw anybody with four dimensional vision like him, in any sport.
ruemara
@Mnemosyne: They should tell that to my blue-eyed blond-haired kid brother. Luckily, he browned up after a few years, but when he was born, they didn’t want to give him to my mum.
Cervantes
@Mnemosyne:
I posted without comment a primary paragraph from Noel Ignatiev’s book. You commented on what “the author means.” In response, I wondered how (or if) your comment took into account the author’s primary point: namely, there is no biological definition of “race.”
If now you’re asking about my view: well, I don’t refer to people by color — not taupe, not black, not white, not green, not purple — so no, I wouldn’t put things the way you do in your question.
Cervantes
@ruemara: That’s why Ignatiev referred to such notions as “absurdities.”
Mnemosyne
@Cervantes:
Ah, yes, you don’t see color, so race is unimportant and not even worth discussing as a social phenomenon. Why bring it up, then?
Mnemosyne
@ruemara:
My husband’s cousin has a seriously mixed family tree, including white, black, and Latino, and once the genes finished their square dance, he and his wife ended up with two blond-haired, blue-eyed kids. So you never really know how things are going to turn out once those genes start mixing it up.
Omnes Omnibus
@Cervantes:
Are you saying that Mole Men are not real?
Omnes Omnibus
@Mnemosyne: Seriously?
Cervantes
@Mnemosyne:
Not what I said.
Why bring what up?
Cervantes
@Omnes Omnibus:
I’m afraid so, yes.
Cervantes
@Omnes Omnibus:
No, just that I wouldn’t call them Taupes.
Ecks
The main difference is that assuming you are sufficiently willing (not a given for the NHL) then it is much easier to make hockey safer than it is football. Remove the fighting, keep cracking down hard on head shots and boarding and high sticks, use no-touch icing, etc.
in football you can’t really remove that you are lining 6 very large men across from each other, wearing hard shell helmets, and have them crunch into each other as fast as they can, 50 times per game.
EthylEster
@Tommy: I guess it depends on what you mean by “wake up”. Some commentators tip-toe around the whole “fighting/illegal hits” issue. But I regularly hear the Canadian guys say things like “There’s over xxx millions of dollars sitting on the bench due to these policies. The league has to do something about it.”
And most of them cannot keep themselves from admiring a big hit. And then of course there is Don Cherry who always vents about how fighting is an integral part of hockey. Imagine that…claiming that players fighting is part of the sport. What other sport would even try to make that claim?
EthylEster
@Ash Can: you can’t even see a significant part of the ice. imagine having a football broadcast where part of the field was never shown on camera.
EthylEster
@raven: in the cemetery?
smintheus
@geg6: It was a Pittsburgh player, the infamous Matt Cooke, who permanently destroyed the career of a great player for Boston, Marc Savard, with a vicious hit to his head a few years ago. But because it wasn’t possible to recover from that injury, and the hit wasn’t even penalized, the NHL has largely ‘forgotten’ about Savard…even while it was obsessed with Crosby’s lesser injury.
smintheus
@Tommy: Agreed…my parents were quite clear back in the early ’70s that they’d never let any of us play football because it was too dangerous, partly due to concussions. And I stopped playing competitive hockey (which I loved) in middle school when it became clear to me that, with kids increasingly emulating the Broad Street Bullies’ violent style of play, that concussions were likely to happen.
Hell, I also loved soccer but always made it a point to avoid heading a ball except in the rarest of circumstances. Didn’t need a lot of insight to see that the guys who did all the heading were slower witted than everyone else.
smintheus
@EthylEster: There is a very good case for fighting in hockey. Not the stupid fighting just to fight nonsense, or the fighting because somebody hit you harder than you’d like. But the fighting to enforce the rules.
Hockey is a very fast and hard sport, in which inches can spell the difference between a clean check and a career-ending injury. The refs rarely do better than a mediocre job even of policing basic infractions; they largely fail to force trouble-makers to refrain from taking illicit pot shots. That enforcement depends on the ability of your opponents to beat the living snot out of you if you overstep the line. Players don’t like to retaliate in kind against your innocent teammates, so they have to be able to take you down in a visible way if the sport is to remain moderately free from vicious play.
It’s by no means a perfect system. Vicious play does still occur, and the right to engage in fights is abused for other purposes than punishing players for unclean hits.
But if fighting were banned, and you attempted to police dangerous hits merely with a few minutes in the penalty box, it would be open season on all the most skilled players. The only substitute, which the NHL is not going to adopt, would be banning dirty players for life; and those bans would have to come on the first incident to have even the slightest deterrent effect.
So: if you want a relatively safe game in which skilled players aren’t afraid to step out onto the ice, then you pretty much have to permit fighting.
Robby-D
@mistermix, lots of comments above already, so briefly, yes, concussions are a problem, but hockey recognized this several years ago and has taken a lot of active steps to minimize player injury, including an increase in definition and enforcement of dangerous hits (particularly where the head is the principal point of contact), increased penalties to repeat offenders, a mandatory player time-out assessment period when a concussion is suspected, stopping fights when a helmet comes off, etc. The jury is out on whether these steps have been effective in reducing consussions.
Check out the Department of Player Safety, they actual run down every single suspension (I only wish they’d explain some of the non-suspensions).
Sublime33
@smintheus:
Smintheus- allowing fighting in hockey has been as effective as the free market has been providing health insurance to everyone who needs and wants it. In other words, it didn’t work for squat in either case until the authorities stepped and altered the landscape by force. The old system in hockey did not work for Mark Savard or Chris Pronger or Jonathan Toews or Brent Seabrook or Max Pacioretty or Daniel Sedin or Marion Hossa, etc.
EthylEster
@smintheus: bullshit.
smintheus
@EthylEster: So please describe for me how much better the situation would be with fighting banned. Oh, right, you can only speculate that the refs would be able to enforce a sweetness-n-light regime on ice…the same refs who didn’t even assess penalties for many of the most notorious of career-threatening dirty hits as things stood.
smintheus
@Sublime33: That’s not the “old system”, in fact. It’s essentially the current system…the system that permits skills players like Loui Eriksson to be targeted for a concussion by a goon, fails to punish the goons, and instead goes after any enforcers who try to exact a penalty against those goons (which happened earlier this year).
No, the old and rather effective system was done away with by the NHL when it began to intervene – in order to limit the amount of fighting. Under the old system, team enforcers would come out, hunt down a filthy player, and beat the crap out of him; there was a very real danger of being injured if you played in a reckless way. In its infinite wisdom, the NHL decided to crack down on players who took on goons on behalf of their injured teammates. Now, the only players who are permitted to fight back against someone who has just elbowed a player in the head, is the player who is lying on the ice concussed. The result has been predictable: An upsurge in reckless play and a lot of concussions from elbows, with few if any penalties being inflicted on those who take other players out.
People who focus on fighting as if it were the bane of the NHL generally don’t understand hockey. There are rather few concussions as a result of fights, because fights at least are almost always fought according to a code that doesn’t permit high speed elbows to the head. The plague of concussions comes from dirty hits that occur during the action.
Sublime33
I might buy the argument that the current system as currently enforced has not fixed the problem. But I won’t ever buy the argument that you cannot safely eliminate fighting in hockey. The NFL figured out a way to eliminate it.
EthylEster
@Sublime33: oh, no. Hockey is the exception! Somehow hockey is SO unique that it is a sport that just could not exist unless “dropping the gloves” is allowed.
smintheus, listen to yourself argue that fisticuffs MUST be allowed else TRUE hockey will cease to exist. You say: Ignore the Olympic experience, ignore the college experience. As to your point that it’s not the fighting, it’s the hits…ever seen a fighter hit his head on the ice?
You (and Don Cherry) are on the wrong side of history. As for saying people who are against fighting actually don’t understand the game…no, they don’t understand the NHL, which is something completely different.
Thursday
In hockey, the main source of concussions isn’t fighting – that’s not even the main, or even a major, source of injuries. It’s checks, both clean and dirty.
The biggest risk in hockey comes from the equipment itself, followed by the ice: it used to be the other way around, but the hard-shell style gear that players wear now means every impact is a potential injury. Players throwing the hit are virtually invulnerable, so had very little motivation to ‘ease up’ when throwing a check until people started realizing how much damage they could do. I would love to see the gear limited to soft pads above the waist (helmets being the obvious exception). Even a very light hit from one of the newer shoulder pads under the chin hurts like a bastard!
The inflexible boards installed at rinks (featuring seamless glass) caused a big jump in injuries – so much so that they did another redesign adding some give above the boards. The newest glass will more frequently pop out, but that’s fine as far as I’m concerned!
I see some critics here who insist they don’t watch the NHL, but feel free to knowingly criticize it – it takes away a bit of credibility, don’t you think? For those who watched hockey in the Olympics, you didn’t see how easy it was to slow the game down and stop attacking in preference to a defensive shell? Some of the games were entertaining, but some of them were dull as dirt. Even the supposedly ‘close’ games Team Canada was in weren’t anywhere near what the score indicated…
As for comparisons to college hockey, bear in mind those teams play a quarter of the games in a limited region; not the 82 (plus playoffs) across the entire continent. The physical demands are much less, and as much as I would like to see the NHL cut down to a 60 game schedule, it’s still a sport driven by box office, so that’s not going to happen.
Cries of “you couldn’t do that in the street!” are the most misplaced: there’s nothing in ANY contact sport that you could get away with in normal life: even soccer tackles would get you arrested. There is an acceptance of potential injury the instant you take up athletics.
Concussions, and the increasing awareness of them, is going to make all sports take a hard look at themselves and how they’re played. Is there ANY level of risk that is going to be acceptable? It’s going to be an interesting few years to see where it goes.
(Oh, and it looks to me like the plane was stolen by the pilot & crew to me. I’d imagine for a terrorist attempt in upcoming years.)
smintheus
@EthylEster: You’re wrong, and Thursday is right. Yes, hockey is exceptional in the NHL. It is a very fast game; the NFL is played at a lumbering speed by comparison.
The bottom line is that unless the refs and the NHL executives are prepared to eject players from games at the slightest endangerment of other players’ heads, and ban them for life the first time they cause a concussion with dangerous play, then banning fighting would make matters much worse rather than better. We know that the League is not going to do that, based upon its utter failure to punish repeat offenders like the monster who nearly ended Eriksson’s career a few months back.
The League has already made matters worse by trying to limit the enforcers’ role without providing any real substitute. And this while (as Thursday notes) the vast improvement in upper body armor practically invites the heaviest of hitting.
Fighting is not the problem. Fighters mostly fight other fighters, and they fight according to a code of behavior. Wild, nasty hits are the problem, and they are dished out according to no code at all. People who obsess about the fighting are just showing how little they understand the NHL.
smintheus
@Sublime33: I didn’t say there is no way to eliminate fighting. I said there is no way without doing things aggressively to enforce the rules that the NHL is not now and has never been prepared to do. Relying entirely upon the good faith of the League and its often incompetent refs would be highly naive.
PBusch
@smintheus: The “policing” reason that hockey fans throw out in support of fighting is a myth. If you look at the NHL statistics for games with fights versus without you quickly find out that cheap shots and dangerous hits are far more likely when players drop the gloves. And they increase by over 250% AFTER a fight. Violence causes more violence. http://itsnotpartofthegame.blogspot.ca/2014/03/beating-dead-horse-fighting-increases.html