Hit on Lindros changed hockey
Stevens’ check on Lindros in 2000 remains focal point for concussion discussions
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 the guy hitting him lunged or left his feet.
Before you get the wrong idea, Lindros is talking about the bodycheck Carolina’s Sebastian Aho received the other day from Calgary’s Mark Giordano — not the infamous hit he received from 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 yesterday’s 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 by the Flyers in a pregame ceremony Thursday night in Philadelphia. “But it happened. So, whether he got a fiveminute 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 due to injury. Technically, he played up 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.
Lindros had missed more than two months because of headaches before returning to the lineup for Game 6. When asked if he was 100 per cent, 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 adrenalin,” 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 six-foot-four and 230-pound mountain of muscle that resembled a linebacker on skates, he was now a wallflower. He played with fear rather than invoking it.
In his first season with the Rangers, he scored 37 goals and 73 points. But it was his lowest point-per-game average at that point in his career.
The point totals dropped significantly after that, with Lindros recording 53 points 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 had 26 points in 49 games.
“Once I got nervous of being banged up and getting hit and going though 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.”
From 1992 to 2007, Lindros registered 865 points in 760 games.
His younger brother Brett, a first-round pick of the New York Islanders, retired because of concussions at the age of 20, playing in only 51 NHL games.
Lindros has devoted his postplaying days to ensuring 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 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, is 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 though the middle, I wasn’t nearly the same player and I didn’t play nearly as well.