NHL should be terrified of threat to Crosby

By Bruce Arthur
National Post
http://www.nationalpost.com/sports/index.html
February 23, 2011 – 10:19 pm

Brian Babineau/NHLI via Getty Images
Sidney Crosby has been out of the Pittsburgh Penguins' lineup since early January with a concussion after two hits to the head.

It has been eight weeks now. Eight weeks since Victor Hedman smashed Sidney Crosby’s head into the glass in Pittsburgh, which was four days after David Steckel ran his shoulder into Crosby’s temple in the Winter Classic at Heinz Field. Which means that it has been eight weeks since Sidney Crosby played an NHL game.

And that should make anybody who cares about hockey nauseous. It should give them a headache. It should cause sleepless nights. In other words, it should make them feel like they have suffered a concussion.

It’s not that Sidney Crosby, as a person, is more important than Marc Savard or David Perron or Matthew Lombardi or Peter Mueller, all of whom have missed most or all of the NHL season with post-concussion symptoms. It’s not that his symptoms are necessarily worse. There were 33 concussions reported in the NHL through Dec. 1. There are a lot of guys sitting in dark and quiet rooms, these days.

But Crosby is different, because he is Sidney Crosby. He is the best player in the world; he is one of the two players in the league who actually have the ability to transcend the league. And since Alexander Ovechkin has spent the season being a more physical Brad Richards — another guy who has the curtains drawn, at the moment — Crosby was, until early January, standing alone.

And then came Steckel and Hedman, neither of whom were fined or suspended for making contact with Crosby’s head from behind. And as the days stretch out, you start to wonder and worry about what comes next.

The precise severity of Crosby’s concussion has not been made public. The Penguins have said he needs to go symptom-free for 10 days before being cleared, and that has apparently not happened. On Jan. 24 he told reporters in Pittsburgh, “People say mild concussion, but I don’t know that there really is such thing. The good thing is the past four to five days have been pretty good, but that’s not to say symptoms won’t come back.”

That was a month ago, now. Then he talked about headaches, and not knowing what triggered them — light, noise, exertion, it all seemed a little random — and that he was happy to be able to drive a car again. Just 10 days ago he returned from some time away from the team, with his parents, and when Pittsburgh Tribune beat reporter Rob Rossi mentioned he didn’t have much of a tan, Crosby said, “I didn’t want to stay [outside] too long because that might bring on [headaches].”

There has been speculation that he is done for the season, but we won’t know until the season is over. So all we really know is that Crosby’s symptoms have not gone away. Or that if they have, they’ve always come back. And that the vacuum of information coming out of Pittsburgh is like the quiet between bombings.

And the NHL should be terrified. Crosby was having his finest season; he is still fifth in the league in scoring despite missing 20 games. And the greatest difference between Crosby and every other hockey player is not his skating, or his hands, or his size. It is his neural capacity to control his skating, to direct his hands, to see the ice, to think the game with a fine edge. It is his brain.

So many players have never been the same after suffering a concussion this severe, or at least, that has lasted this long. Eric Lindros, Paul Kariya, Pat LaFontaine, Keith Primeau, Savard, on and on. Not every concussion opens a window to more concussions. Maybe this is the only brain injury Sidney Crosby will ever suffer, and he will fulfill the promise of being a generation-defining player. He is just 23.

But either way, he will now play the rest of his career in greater danger of a second concussion, and a third. The worst-case scenario, of course, is that he becomes Lindros all over again. Crosby’s much better at protecting himself, but in a league where those two hits are deemed acceptable, it might not matter. When he decried such hits back in January, Crosby said, “when you get hit like that there’s nothing you can do, there’s no way you can protect yourself.”

And yet they went unpunished.

Steckel’s intent is a matter of debate — it didn’t look like an accident to me — but Hedman’s hit was reckless, and the 6-foot-6 defenceman rose up prior to impact. But the NHL refuses to ban hits to the head over fear that it will strip the physicality from the game. The NHL sells violence, red meat, up until the New York Islanders play Ogie Ogilthorpe hockey. That, these days, is the line.

And even then Mario Lemieux’s post-Penguins-Islanders brawl comments still ring true. “We, as a league, must do a better job of protecting the integrity of the game and the safety of our players.” He might employ Matt Cooke, but he was right.

And if what has happened to Sidney Crosby isn’t enough to get the NHL to significantly alter its supplemental discipline mechanisms, faulty and ridiculous as they are, then it feels as though nothing will. Last season Steve Downie attempted a sort of figure-four leg lock on Crosby as they skated side by side. No injury, no discipline. Cooke took a run at Ovechkin’s knee a few weeks back. No injury, no suspension. Headshot discipline has varied wildly, as per league policy. Inevitably, a superstar — a real superstar, in a league full of guys who don’t sell tickets — was going to get hurt. Two headshots, no suspensions, and Sidney Crosby gets headaches for two months.

And what happens now? It was earlier this month that LaFontaine, who was a magnet for brain injuries during his stellar 15-year career, told nhl.com that “Once you get to a certain point with head injuries, there’s no turning back. For some reason, we use up this reserve. We all start out with a full tank in reserve and every time we get hit, we deplete that resource. For some reason, when we’re on empty, what used to take us a week or two weeks to bounce back is now taking us months and sometimes years.”

Nobody knows how far away Sidney Crosby is from empty. Hopefully, a long way. But right now the face of the NHL is nowhere to be seen, and we don’t know if he will ever be the same.

•Email: barthur@nationalpost.com Twitter: @bruce_arthur

Related:

http://sports.nationalpost.com/2011/02/11/absence-should-not-keep-crosby-from-winning-mvp/