WAITING FOR NHL’S ANSWERS
Dark areas in concussion lawsuit
Bryan Bickell certainly sounded like someone who had suffered a concussion.
It was before Game 2 of the Stanley Cup Final, and the Chicago Blackhawks forward was addressing the injury that had caused him to sit out Game 1.
“I don’t know exactly what it is,” he said in Tampa. “It’s something that comes and goes.”
It could come back any moment, he explained. But he also said it was not the dreaded C-word, despite the similarity in symptoms. He had passed all the concussion tests, he said.
A few minutes later, his coach, Joel Quenneville, was asked about Bickell’s status, and the preamble to the question noted that he had passed those tests.
Quenneville, ever brusque, responded that Bickell passed the concussion tests because “he never had a concussion.” End of story.
The Bickell injury was barely even a footnote to the Blackhawks’ victory over the Lightning — he played in Game 3, then not again — but his case is instructive amid the ongoing fight between the NHL and retired players who contend the league and its clubs were not forthcoming with its athletes about their knowledge of the long-term health risks of concussions.
That fight, in the form of a lawsuit filed in a Minnesota court involving about 70 retirees, reached another signpost late last week when a judge ordered the league and its U.S.-based teams to turn over their research on concussions, as well as correspondence such as emails between medical staff, or between trainers and outside doctors, plus certain medical histories and NHL databases.
The 30-page ruling is mostly a dry rundown of the legalities surrounding medical disclosure in workplaces, but the nub of the judge’s ruling was that the information requested was “clearly relevant” to the claims, as it “relates to what the NHL and (the teams) knew about concussions and when they knew it.”
But, as the Bickell case in the final demonstrates rather neatly, the question of who knew what and when is hard to pin down.
The simplest way to avoid concussion protocols is to not acknowledge that one exists. Whether Bickell had in fact suffered one at the end of the conference final, or had coincidentally been struck by vertigo or something similarly hard to diagnose at around the time he was pulled from the lineup, is beside the point.
Quenneville provided the road map either way: Deny the concussion ever existed and go about your business.
That is the challenge with trying to take corrective action against the concussion problem in pro sports: The buy-in is far from universal. So, when the NHL touts, as it has, that it has observed double-digit drops in the incidence of concussions since it instituted tougher protocols a few years ago, that has to be considered in light of the reality that some players and teams can do an end-run around the protocols in the first place. Concussions that are not reported will not be observed.
The league, in its rare disclosures on the topic, has certainly been a little cute with the numbers.
When commissioner Gary Bettman said at the close of the 2014 season that the NHL’s own study had determined that only 17 per cent of concussions were a result of an illegal hit, a fact he used to dismiss the argument that players were running around and recklessly harming their opponents at an absurd rate, the statistic also suggested that more stringent penalties for dirty hits couldn’t have been that much of a force in the overall drop of concussions.
When fewer than two in 10 are the result of an illegal headshot, there must be some other factor that plays a bigger role in the observed reduction. Like, say, a lack of initial reporting.
And there’s a reason why teams and players might continue to play loose with the rules when it comes to brain injury: because so much continues to remain unknown.
Bettman was roasted for his comments during the Western Conference final that there was “no evidence yet” that concussions “necessarily” lead to the disease CTE that had been detected in the brains of several former players who had taken their own lives, but he had a point, even if it was made clumsily.
The judge overseeing the lawsuit involving the National Football League and thousands of its former players noted that the CTE study was still in a “nascent” state.
Her ruling cited a statement from experts that summed up the medical science on the issue this way: “(I)t is not possible to determine the causality or risk factors (for CTE) with any certainty. As such, the speculation that repeated concussion or subconcussive impacts cause CTE remains unproven.”
The judge in the NHL case in Minnesota noted, as she ordered disclosure of medical evidence, that “the requested information will be equally relevant and important to the NHL’s defence of this action.”
That is, the answers to what they knew about concussions and when they knew it could end up being “not enough” and “too late.”
No one should doubt that there is a link between concussions and CTE. But how strong is it? And are certain people at much greater risk of developing the latter as a result of the former?
Without conclusive answers, the temptation for a lot of athletes will be to keep playing, and hope for the best.