Chris Pronger out for season with concussion

People who pay a lot of attention to hockey know there has been a crackdown on some of the notorious concussion-causing hits in recent seasons with the implementation of rule 48 and the reinforcing of the boarding rules. My suspicion is the next crackdown will come on charging - the league has shown some signs that coming off the ice after a hit will be the next thing they try and eliminate, and as long as they are consistent about this (ha!) I would be for it.

Helmets will never prevent a concussion. It's not what they're designed for. Helmets prevent catastrophic skull fractures (like the one that killed Bill Masterton or the football players around the turn of the century), and they do an excellent job at that. But until someone figures out how to fundamentally slow down the speed of a skull in a collision, be that with a player, the boards or the ice, the brain will still move around inside the skull hard enough to potentially cause a concussion.

People freak out because Bettman downplayed the research at BU (and if you read his comments, he's never said "yeah, we're okay with concussions" - he's said that the research at BU is incredibly preliminary and does not prove anything at this point specifically regarding CTE, and he's right).

Concussions are on the rise in European hockey, as far as I know at least, because of the advances in diagnosis and awareness.

The biggest "problems" with concussions and hockey is body checking. Normal, clean, shoulder-on-chest bodychecking. Checks in general are about 5 times (IIRC, don't have the article in front of me) more likely to cause a concussion than a fight, and they are also much, much more common, with 30-50 checks a game and about half a fight or less. And there's no way to take that out of the game without fundamentally changing its nature.

The league should be doing all it can to prevent illegal hits that cause concussions and they should start trying to figure out ways to pressure teams to make safe calls on when to return to play (hi Pittsburgh!), but like with any sport, there is going to be a level of assumed risk.

Finally, using Pronger as the example is a little disingenous. From my understanding at least, his issues with PCS were spurred not by the violence of the contact but the fact that his brain was more susceptible to them because of the eye issues he had from the initial contact. That's a rare circumstance and calls into question the validity of the Flyers doctors letting him play in the first place. Honestly, it's like the Crosby situation, where the real issue wasn't the Hedman check but the fact that the Penguins didn't sit him after he was clearly concussed by the Steckel collision.

 

Dryden.

www.grantland.com/story/_/id/7352942/waiting-science

 

Thought this would be pertinent here with others wondering about lack of innovation in hockey helmets, to show that companies aren't standing idly by.

http://watch.tsn.ca/nhl/#clip587854

While this TSN piece focuses on Bauer, all major manufacturers have been working on their own technology for more than a decade. I know my last year of midget hockey in 1999-2000, I had one of I think CCM's first attempts at a concussion preventative helmet, with a similar harness to the one in the video -- although if I remember correctly the harness had a different intention, instead of a device to allow the helmet to absorb a twisting blow, it was designed to keep the helmet in place. And I still suffered a major concussion -- my sixth to that point -- which ended my hockey playing days.

Hoping this works for the Americans as well.