I don't know if any major league commissioner is exactly popular, but Gary Bettman might be the most hated. And that's definitely saying something. He was recently back in the news again, as the Canadian government has apparently taken it upon itself to start looking at head injuries in hockey. I haven't listened to the hearing myself,* but I feel like I have read enough summaries to get a good feel for how things went down. First of all, let me say there is at least one thing Bettman got absolutely right: it's going to be absolutely impossible to take all hits ot head out of the game. There is too much incidental contact to make such a rule enforceable, and it would change hockey into a completely different game. That part is absolutely correct, and it is just as true that there is no completely safe way to tackle in football. Essentially, in the real world, sometimes shit's just gonna happen. Sorry. *Admittedly, I haven't really even looked. It might be easily found, I legitimately don't know. And here's where things start to go sideways. Instead of stating that these are just the risks of the game, the same way you accept the risk of a car accident if you choose to drive or something similar, Bettman instead launches into how nobody has proven a link to hockey and CTE and how much safer hockey is than football. This was just an absolutely terrible path to take. Let's the take the second argument first. For one, I don't even know that I buy that argument on the surface. Football probably has more routine contact, and certainly more head-to-head type contact than hockey. That much is plain to see just from watching the games. But hockey players still get hit and jostled with some authority very routinely, and these guys are playing an 82 game season at minimum. There could be up to an additional 28 games if all four playoff rounds went the distance. That's unlikely, of course, but it is most definitely a reasonable outcome. By my history-major math, that's potentially asking hockey players to play 110 games of a pretty rough and tumble sport. By contrast, the NFL plays 16 games, with maybe four playoff games, bringing the maximum total to 20. We know that CTE and other similar head injuries build with repetitive trauma. Which schedule do you think might build trauma faster? 110 games or 20 games? Frankly, I think the whole point is pretty moot anyway. That whole argument isn't really a meaningful distinction. Whether hockey or football is more "dangerous" is not ultimately very important. Each sport needs to stand on its own terms. And, yes, to very bluntly answer the first argument, of course there is evidence to suggest hockey players struggle with CTE. Just as the NFL's case, the evidence is there and the logic is just obvious. Instead of instinctively denying those allegations and trying to set up a fight, it would be so much better for the league to just come right out and say it. If you are going to play hockey, especially at a high level, there is just going to be a chance for all sorts of injuries, including head injuries. The league can get better about diagnosing them, I'm sure, and better about treating and resting players who might experience it. I don't have those policies off the top of my head. My guess is they're probably decent, but there is still work to be done. Like I recently said (or at least seriously inferred), the vast majority of people (and certainly of fans) can accept that there are risks to these games. When you're doing things as physically demanding as playing professional sports at the highest levels and asking human bodies to repeatedly perform tasks the body wasn't necessarily built to do over and over, things are going to break. You see it even in non-contact sports. Baseball pitchers are going to tear the tendons in their arms. Hitters are going to tear obliques as they twist. Ankles and knees of basketball players are going to break in all sorts of ways. It happens. Head injuries are just going to happen. I'm really only speaking for myself here, but I think if you asked around, you would find this is a pretty widespread opinion. Nobody is really asking for football or hockey to change the games themselves all that much. All anybody is really asking is for the leagues to acknowledge the issue and just do better about taking care of the aftermath. Anything that can be done to prevent it is good, of course, but just simply giving ex-players more resources to manage and current players more time to recover would go a lot longer in most minds than tinkering with the nuts and bolts of the rules. All of this to say, given what we know of Gary Bettman and powerful people in general, there is no way in hell any of this is going to be that easy. Comments are closed.
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