‘Where do you draw the line?’
Eric Lindros was never the same after suffering a concussion after the infamous hit in 2000. Now he fights to make sure no one else has to go through what he did
PHILADELPHIA — Eric Lindros doesn’t think it was a dirty hit.
Honestly, he doesn’t. If you look at it again, he said you’ll see that he was skating through the middle of the ice with his head down and then — bang! — he ends up crumpled on the ice. It looked bad, but Lindros said it was shoulder to shoulder. It was a clean hit. It’s not like he guy hitting him lunged or left his feet.
Before you get the wrong idea, Lindros is talking about the bodycheck that Carolina’s Sebastian Aho received the other day from Calgary’s Mark Giordano — not the infamous hit he received from the Devils’ Scott Stevens in Game 7 of the 2000 Eastern Conference final. The latter, which effectively ended Lindros’ career in Philadelphia, would be dirty by today’s standards.
Heck, it was dirty by any standards. Except the lunging shoulder that Stevens delivered to Lindros’ jaw wasn’t ruled that way at the time.
“I’m not a referee,” said Lindros, whose No. 88 jersey will be retired in a pre-game ceremony on Thursday night. “But it happened. So, whether he got a five-minute major or not, I’m out and probably not available for the final. So what does that matter to me, whether he got penalized or not? It occurred.”
This is how Lindros has made peace with the fact that his career, like Bobby Orr’s and Paul Kariya’s, ended far too early because of injury. Technically, he played until the age of 34. But after the Stevens’ hit, which was his sixth known concussion at the time — and his fourth in five months — he became a different player. He was probably a different player even before that hit.
If you recall, Lindros had missed more than two months because of headaches before returning to the lineup for Game 6 against the Devils. When asked if he was 100%, Lindros said: “I was good enough.”
“You know what happens? What happens is you come back and the first two games, and it’s all emotion and adrenaline,” he said. “And then the third or fourth game upon a comeback you need to have that base. But you can get through the first couple on emotion.”
Without that “base,” Lindros’ hands and head were not quite working in sync like they had in the past. Picking up a loose puck in the neutral zone in the first period of Game 7, Lindros skated up the ice and cut toward the middle. Maybe he was focused more on the puck than his surroundings. Maybe there was a blind spot in his peripheral vision. Maybe he simply wasn’t as sharp as he previously had been.
Either way, he didn’t see the vicious hit that made Stevens one of the most feared defencemen in the NHL and knocked Lindros out of hockey for 15 months.
When he finally returned, Lindros had been traded to
the New York Rangers. He looked different. But it wasn’t necessarily the different jersey. While Lindros was still a 6-foot-4, 230-pound mountain of muscle who resembled a linebacker on skates, he was now a wallflower. He played with fear rather than creating it in others with his size and skill.
In his first season with the Rangers, he scored 37 goals and 73 points. But it was his lowest point-pergame average of his career. The point totals dropped significantly after that, with Lindros recording 53 in 200203, 32 in 2003-04 and 22 in 33 games with the Toronto Maple Leafs in 2005-06.
In his final season with the Dallas Stars, he scored five goals and 26 points in 49 games.
“Once I got nervous of being banged up and getting hit and going through the middle, I wasn’t nearly the same player and I didn’t play nearly as well,” said Lindros, who averaged 1.35 points per game with the Flyers. “It’s a game you can’t play with fear.”
After a 15-year career that was slowed and ultimately stopped by concussions — his younger brother Brett, a firstround pick of the New York Islanders, retired because of concussions at the age of 20 — Lindros has devoted his post-playing days to ensuring that others do not go through the same things he dealt with. Based on what he’s seeing in the league these days, he doesn’t believe they will.
“I think respect has been addressed immensely,” said Lindros, who acknowledged that hits like the one that Giordano delivered on Aho, will probably never leave the game completely. “They’re going to occur. Aho went to go deke around him — pull and drag — and he got hit. Aho was pretty low, but Giordano didn’t move. It’s not like he lunged or anything. He just hit him shoulder to shoulder.
“And this is where they need to decide what to do. Where do you draw the line? Because my brother’s last hit was shoulder to shoulder. It was the chest, not the head. But the whole body shakes.”
The solution, according to Lindros, lies in more research. He has been working with See the Line, an organization focused on concussion education, and has also raised money for The Concussion Project, a research initiative at Western University in London, Ont. While he praised the NHL for adding concussion spotters, he hopes the league will take a more proactive — rather than a reactive — approach to making the game safer.
“Where are we in our research? If we’re going to fix, if we’re going to get right to the bottom of it, we need to have a strong base built up,” Lindros said. “When you build a bridge, you can’t just throw on the little things at the top and call it a day. Good luck with that. I’ll let you go on it first. No, you need to build it up strong from the base.
“Really, what it comes down to is culture change and the culture isn’t there yet. But culture only takes you so far.”
Once I got nervous of being banged up and getting hit and going through the middle, I wasn’t nearly the same player and I didn’t play nearly as well. It’s a game you can’t play with fear. Former Flyers great Eric Lindros says he wasn’t the same player after getting concussed in the 2000 playoffs