A hit involving Pittsburgh Penguins captain Sidney Crosby is throwing the NHL’s concussion protocol under a microscope during the second round of the Stanley Cup Playoffs.
Crosby played in Game 6 of a second-round matchup with the Washington Capitals on Monday and colliding head-first with the boards behind the Washington net in the first period. Despite Crosby being slow to get up, the NHL’s central concussion spotter was unable to have him removed from the game due to semantics in league policy.
The collision Crosby was involved in was deemed not to be a “mechanism of injury” based on the league’s guidelines, according to USA Today.
“Depending on the mechanism of injury, ‘slow to get up’ does not trigger mandatory removal,” NHL deputy commissioner Bill Daly said to USA Today. “The protocol has to be interpreted literally to mandate a removal. ‘Ice’ as compared to ‘boards’ is in there for a reason. It’s the result of a study on our actual experiences over a number of years. ‘Ice’ has been found to be a predictor of concussions — ‘boards’ has not been.”
If you missed it, here is a video of the collision in question…
In his NHL mailbag post earlier this morning, our Dave Lozo commented on how quickly Crosby returned from a concussion.
Five days. That’s how long it took Crosby to go from concussion to playing again. He missed one game. That’s a shorter time for clearance than most NFL players get when they suffer a concussion on Sunday then return the following Sunday, and that always seems insane when it happens.
Dave is absolutely right. It is insane seeing a hockey player with a history of concussions returning to a game five days after being diagnosed with a concussion, especially in this day and age where we have a wealth of knowledge regarding head trauma in sports. So why is the NHL’s concussion spotting protocol so limited in what it can or can not do when a player has a hit like this on the ice?
Concussion Legacy Foundation co-founder and CEO Chris Nowinski is certainly taking aim at the NHL’s limited concussion spotters, calling the policy “a poorly written policy that should be amended” as quickly as possible.
“Any head contact is a possible mechanism of injury,” Nowinski said to USA Today. “I can’t believe we have to say that in 2017.”
Making a change to a policy can happen overnight if the NHL chooses to do so, but the more likely scenario would be to see the policy reviewed in the offseason and amended as needed if a change is warranted. If one of the NHL’s top players like Crosby is going to be victimized by a weak stance on concussions, then the push to make changes needed to protect its players will be more likely to come to fruition.
