Hockey’s suit faces longer odds
Adrian Dater, The Denver Post
Any player suffering from postconcussion symptoms deserves sympathy. Last year, I hung out a lot with former Avalanche enforcer Scott Parker for a series of stories, and they documented the years of misery he continues to endure from the effects of concussions.
Parker said at the time he would not join the class-action lawsuit that 40 former players filed against the NHL in 2013, saying, “I knew the risks.” The number of players has since grown into the hundreds, now including Parker. What changed his mind? He has declined to comment since joining the suit.
The NHL finally responded to the charges last week, filing in aMinnesota court a motion to have the case dismissed. The plaintiffs’ original filing said the league “either took no steps to protect and educate its players or took insufficient steps to make players aware of the real risks of playing in the NHL, which would have protected players from unnecessary long-term effects of head trauma.”
When I sat down with NHL commissioner Gary Bettman at his New York office a couple of weeks ago, he offered a full-throated defense of why the charges against the league have no merit. The NHL, as Bettman was quick to point out, was the first major sports league to institute baseline concussion testing in 1997.
“We were the first sports league to have a panel with the players association and the medical community to address it. We were the first sports league to have a protocol on the diagnosis and return-to-play decisions,” Bettman said. “We changed the rules, we softened the boards and glass, we changed equipment, we created a department of player safety— all of those were firsts. What other league does supplemental discipline explaining their result on a video? All in the name of education and transparency.”
The group of NHL players who filed the lawsuit did so not long after the NFL paid $765 million to former players to settle claims of negligence regarding education of and treatment of brain injury. Some have criticized the timing, saying it was a copycat attempt at a money grab.
We’ll leave that for the courts to decide, but the odds that former NHL players will see the same “success” that NFL players did seem remote at best. Case in point: Starting with the 1979-80 season, the NHL instituted a rule that players had to wear helmets, but some players at the time privately mocked such an idea, saying it would dilute the macho factor that made the game so compelling. Some players signed a grandfather clause waiver that allowed them to keep playing without helmets, with Craig MacTavish continuing to play without one through the 1996-97 season.
Can anyone imagine a hockey player not wearing a helmet today? Yet it was that way for a long time. The NHL was a much slower game back in the day, though, which made helmets less of a necessity. Watch some old tapes of how the game was played from roughly 1980 and earlier, and there was nowhere near the speed and ferocity of body checking there is today. That in itself is another strike against the players of yesteryear’s lawsuit.
There is little doubt NHL playerswere, compared with today, relative pawns in a game ruled by cheap ownerswho could do pretty much anything theywanted to them contractually. No doubt players back then did not receive the kind of qualitymedical care they do today. Maybe the really older players will be given a token offer of a settlement to make this go away. But don’t count on it.
As Bettman showed recently, there is now no doubt the league is ready to join the fight against some of its own.