NHL playing disgraceful head games

NHL commissioner Gary Bettman probably isn’t a moron. Yes, Bettman’s newest denial of the link between concussions and brain disease runs against common sense. But it isn’t Bettman’s job to be sensible; his job is to maximize the market value of professional hockey for the owners of the league’s 30 teams.

And that means setting a screen of legal mumbo-jumbo between those owners and anything that diminishes hockey’s profitability, including a push from lawmakers to limit the role of fighting in hockey.

Bettman’s latest denial came in a Friday letter to Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) that became public Monday when it was filed in a federal class-action suit against the NHL. Prob- ably with the help of a lawyer or two, Bettman wrote the letter in response to questions that Blumenthal had confronted him with last month on the eve of the NHL draft.

The letter doesn’t directly answer the questions, but instead uses technical language to pretend the league doesn’t hear the ticking of the time bomb set to explode as more former hockey pros succumb to a devastating neurodegenerative disease.

“The science regarding CTE, including the asserted ‘link’ to concussions that you reference, remains nascent, particularly with respect to what causes CTE and whether it can be diagnosed by specific clinical symptoms,” writes Bettman, referring to chronic traumatic encephalopathy, the devastating brain disease haunting the NFL.

Mainstream America generally knows that repetitive head trauma has caused brain damage in athletes who play violent sports. Will Smith was in a movie about it, and journalists produced widely scrutinized books, articles, and documentaries. So Bettman is skating a rhetorical pirouette through a maze of legal liability, poor guy, under the watchful gaze of a hockey fan base that knows the real score. Fighting is a deep tradition and there are fans who like it; but it is also an element of the game that could be restricted through explicit abolition, with steep fines and longer penalties.

If Bettman is indeed not an idiot, but is only downplaying the link between head trauma and brain disease for financial reasons, he is a danger to his own players. This illness is no joke: CTE drives its victims into early dementia, rage episodes, depression, and devastating cycles of addiction like that which consumed former NHL player Derek Boogaard. In the NFL, the disease has led beloved NFL players like Dave Duerson and Junior Seau to kill themselves. The NFL has begun to acknowledge its problems, but the NHL can’t move forward in some way to protect players until they admit they have one.

While the science of CTE is relatively young, it’s clear that athletes and soldiers who sustain repetitive brain trauma are at risk of the disease, which can only be diagnosed posthumously. Hockey’s most prolific fighters, enforcers who protect star players and take bare-knuckle fists to the head, are more vulnerable than could have been known back in the day.

Researchers have found neurodegenerative disease in hardhitting former NHL players like Boogaard, Bob Probert, and Reg Fleming. Boogaard’s family is suing Bettman and the NHL for wrongful death. His agonizing decline is mirrored in that of amateur players who have suffered from hockey-related brain trauma.

Their struggles and those of their families are increasingly well known to the communities they come from — people who will only chuckle at the foolishness of Bettman’s legalese — “a causal link between concussions and CTE has not been demonstrated,” he writes.

Thanks to Sen. Blumenthal, those people can now look to the public record for evidence of what kind of leadership the NHL’s commissioner is willing or able to show.