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[hockeygod]

CULLEN: HOCKEY AT THE SLOAN SPORTS ANALYTICS CONFERENCE

SCOTT CULLEN TSN 3/11/2011

After detailing my time last week at the Sloan Sports Analytics Conference here, I had promised a look at more hockey-centric themes from the conference in a future blog.

This is that stats-oriented stick-and-puck blog.

Part of the reason for making my inaugural trek to the conference was that this year was the first year that they had a Hockey Analytics panel. I know baseball is at the forefront of the stats movement and that basketball has been getting on the fast track in recent years but, going to the conference, I really wasn't sure how NHL teams use advanced analytics.

Now that I'm home, I still don't know, but my suspicion is that it's not nearly enough.

In any case, we'll begin this recap with the Saturday morning panel, moderated by Katie Burke, daughter of Maple Leafs GM Brian Burke and the Chair of the Alumni Executive Board for the conference.

The panel consisted of:
Stan Bowman, the general manager of the Stanley Cup-champion Chicago Blackhawks;
Jeff Solomon, VP of Hockey Operations and Legal Affairs, Los Angeles Kings;
Dan MacKinnon, Director of Player Personnel, Pittsburgh Penguins;
Don Fishman, Assistant GM and Director of Legal Affairs, Washington Capitals;
Jim Price, President, RinkNet

Bowman acknowledged that he broke into the hockey business on the finance side of things and used statistics to help improve his value on the operations side.

Admittedly, however, hockey's statistical analysis isn't the most refined. Bowman noted that the initial way of evaluating players internally consisted of having the coach give a player a rating (out of five) after each game.

The trouble with that subjective rating was that coaches tended to overvalue grinders in that format. With no expectations to score, a grinder would get a good grade provided they did the requisite skating and hitting, whereas a skilled forward that was expected to score would tend not to generate good ratings unless he produced offensively.

While the Blackhawks still use the subjective measurement, it's been combined with statistical measures that help smooth out the ratings. Bowman wasn't specific in detailing what stats the Blackhawks use, which is understandable, but there was no hinting that the Blackhawks have some special stats that they keep on their own.

When you consider the stats revolution that is taking place in basketball, for example, it's easy to grasp from Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban and Houston Rockets GM Daryl Morey (two of the more prominent execs at the Sloan Sports Analytics Conference) that their organizations keep stats that aren't readily accessible in the public domain, but there wasn't even any hint in that regard from the hockey panel, that their teams have, say, a metric for clearing the zone successfully while under pressure (for defencemen).

I found Solomon to be interesting because he was a former player agent and, from an agent's perspective, I could see advanced statistics really coming in handy when it comes to contract negotiation time and given the reputation of a baseball agent like Scott Boras for statistical preparation as a source of leverage when it comes time to conduct contract talks, I wouldn't be surprised if there are hockey agents that are more progressive on the stats front than their counterparts in NHL front offices.

To that end, Solomon seemed to be open to more statistical input, but acknowledged that the NHL seemed to be at least five years behind the other sports when it comes to using advanced statistical measures.

MacKinnon and Fishman had what amounted to team marquee value, since they represented those involved in HBO's 24-7 Capitals-Penguins. While it was clear that both thirst for more information, it didn't seem like they were heavy into advanced statistical measures.

When MacKinnon made the point that he doesn't even know the stats lines of the Penguins prospects, insisting that the projection required for prospects is too great to get overly concerned about their junior or college stats, I was at least gratified by Bowman's assertion that if a player is being projected as a scoring forward in the NHL, then they have to have a certain level of scoring accomplishment in junior.

That's not to say a productive junior player is guaranteed to score as a pro, but it's very, very rare for a player to score at a higher rate as he moves up the developmental ladder.

Additionally, I simply can't imagine that there can't be metrics, especially when combined with scouting information, to help measure the likelihood of a prospect reaching expectations in the NHL.

Remember when Angelo Esposito scored 98 points as a QMJHL rookie in 2005-2006, then fell to 79 points the next year and yet the Penguins still drafted him 20th overall in 2007?

Even before the knee injuries that seem to have derailed his prospect status, the dip in Esposito's production (to 69 points in 2007-2008) had to be some cause for concern; something that, with the right metric, the numbers may have brought to light before the decline was so apparent.

Admittedly, part of the trouble when dealing with the statistics of junior and college hockey players is that there is such a wide variance in the calibre of teammates and opposition.

I still expect that the kind of bright minds involved at this conference would be able to figure out ways to include strength of teammates and opposition into the metrics, so that numbers aren't just thrown out entirely.

This is a common challenge for those in analytics, trying to get good data included, rather than thrown away altogether because it doesn't necessarily have the all-encompassing answer in a single number. Making a decision that is even 10% smarter is still worthwhile, believe it or not.

One of the more frustrating moments, for me, during this panel was a sequence in which MacKinnon, Fishman and Bowman all took shots at the value of plus-minus, because it doesn't measure strength of opposition and some players get "easy minutes" and/or players may be benefitting from playing with stronger teammates.

This is an entirely valid concern, but hardly limited to plus-minus.

I get it, plus-minus is hardly the be-all and end-all of stats, but doesn't who a player plays with and against affect everything they do on the ice? Don't tell me that playing on Sidney Crosby's wing brings the same expectations for goal scoring, or even shots on goal, as it does for those skating alongside Mike Rupp, and that's before we even get to who they match up against on other teams.

My view is that all stats need to put into context if they are going to have value. Go back to Esposito's rookie season in the Q, when he was so highly-touted after scoring 98 points. He was the second-highest scorer on his team that season, a mere 54 (!) points behind Alexander Radulov. Given that context, wouldn't that undermine the pure total of 98 points all on its own?

Conversely, one of this year's first-round prospects, Matt Puempel of the Peterborough Petes, is having a productive year, scoring 69 points in 55 games, ahead of teammate Austin Watson, who was a first-round pick of the Nashville Predators last summer.

Puempel is also minus-33 on a brutal Petes team that has 13 skaters with a rating at minus-20 or lower. When put into the context of his team's overall troubles, Puempel's value as a draft prospect doesn't seem to be affected much (if at all) by his plus-minus.

Fishman did, however, use context to bring Alexander Ovechkin's struggles to light, saying that Ovechkin's even-strength production was still good, but that his real struggles have come on the power play, a unit that has struggled as a whole for Washington.

Ovechkin has six power play goals in 68 games this season, well behind the pace of last year's 13 power play goals in 72 games that was his previous career low.

One of the presenters that I met with at the conference was Brian Macdonald, an assistant math professor at West Point, who had devised an adjusted plus-minus statistic that accounted for teammates, opposition, zone start and could be used as a measure for special teams as well.

Anytime you're dealing with advanced stats for the first time, it's nice to at least see some results off the top that make sense and while discussion with Brian revealed some of the surprised that he thought might be flukes (like Jason Pominville among the top even-strength defensive wingers), there's something to be said for identifying value in typically underrated players like Jan Hejda and Mike Weaver on the defensive metric.

I still need to spend more time going through Macdonald's numbers, but I obviously like his idea of trying to account for strength of teammates and opposition to devise his numbers because it helps provide context.

Michael Schuckers, an associate statistics professor at St. Lawrence University, comprised a defense-independent goaltender rating, which attempted to remove the quality of shot distribution that each goaltender faces, evaluating goaltenders based on a league-wide shot distribution and quality.

Again, the numbers require some investigation, but the result showed Ryan Miller as the best in the league, with numbers that indicated that the Sabres effectively surrendered a league-average quality of shots against last season.

At the lower end of the scale, for last season, Tim Thomas and Jimmy Howard were a couple of the goaltenders that would have fared substantially worse if given league-average shot quality.

On the surface, the theory is interesting and given the rise of fielding independent pitching in baseball, defense independent goaltending in hockey makes sense as a measure too.

I also ran into Adam Gold, who runs http://www.WinningUnlimited.com. Adam has done some stats work for the St. Louis Blues, but his pet project is much more ambitious, trying to change the way the league sets its draft order based on when a team is eliminated from the postseason.

For a league that has shown zero interest in changing an already massively-flawed standings model, Adam has a big hill to climb, but part of the beauty of the Sloan Conference is getting unique ideas like his.

One of the presentations I didn't get to — and I most defintely regret — was e-mailed to me after the fact (the beauty of TSN's reach in the hockey community), Does Decision Order Matter? An Empirical Analysis of the NHL Draft, by Michael Brydon and Peter Tingling, assistant business professors at Simon Fraser who focus on decision theory when examining NHL drafts from 1995 through 2003, revealed just how random the results of the NHL draft tend to be.

Their findings suggest that, while some teams may hold an advantage in early rounds, a lot of teams do no better than random chance at the draft table and, even without advanced statistical measures being utilized, could be improved upon simply with better decision-making processes.

Now, if an NHL team really wanted to go crazy, maybe they could use improved decision-making processes and advanced statistical data to really come up with a comparitive advantage over the opposition.

On the Hockey Analytics panel, MacKinnon seemed most interested in having an expanded statistical reach in junior and college hockey, tracking more than mere goals and assists, but there was no real suggestion about how that would occur.

Is it valuable enough information that NHL's Central Scouting would be responsible for increasing the statistical measures in developmental leagues?

There does seem like a desire for knowledge but, as it is with any sports, it's fair to question how analytics can be applied to give a team an advantage.

When one considers that the Dallas Mavericks, for example, have a full-time statistical analyst (Roland Beech) on the payroll, and estimates at the conference indicated that there may be 20 NBA teams with someone in charge of providing analytics, Mark Cuban's position seems appropriate. "The way I look at it, relative to the cost," said Cuban in a recent Time Magazine interview, "if (Beech) wins me one game, he's paid for himself."

While there surely are some NHL teams that use analytics, I'm not yet sure how widespread it is in practice. This league still seems awfully old school in a lot of ways. No, really, it does.

The Minnesota Wild hired former sports writer Chris Snow to take on a position that would help them address contract negotiations, arbitration, free agency and the draft, but he was let go when a new regime took over.

While some teams may have consulting done when it comes to analytics, it still seems like an area ripe for improvement in many cases.

As mentioned in my previous post on the conference, scouting information can be combined with analytics, so there really ought to be more efficient methods of doing business for NHL teams. If a team's analytics department is able to help with an arbitration case, a draft pick, a contract negotiation, a savvy trade, isn't any one of those things likely to be worth the salary of one full-time employee?

Maybe they're all doing it and we just don't know about it but, as I say, I'm suspicious that this is an under-utilized method of evaluation, both in terms of player and contract value.

Part of the reason may be this unfortunate point about analytics in hockey that was presented by Fishman. As analytics would seem like a prime tool when going to arbitration with a player, one of the downsides of the process is that the arbitrators tend not to know hockey particularly well so the statistics that end up being used are very basic.

That being the case, it means that even trying to convince an arbitrator that adjusted plus-minus is a much better true measure of a player's value seems like a battle not worth fighting.

Can a hockey team embrace this kind of analysis?

Under a salary cap system in which teams at the top are forced to make ruthless financial decisions all the time and teams at the lower end of the pay scale are run on tight budgets, how can teams not adopt something that would allow them to make better decisions with their money?

I have lots of questions, but still need answers. Maybe someone could provide some analytics on this for me.

Dean
M.Ed (Coaching)
Ch.P.C. (Chartered Professional Coach)
Game Intelligence Training
"Great education depends on great teaching."

[hockeygod]

Time is now for GMs to step up on player safety

CBC SPORTS Mike Milbury March 14, 2011

A couple of times each year, the NHL's general managers meet to discuss pertinent business. There is never enough time to thoroughly discuss the issues presented to them by the league.

Maybe this time they can clear the slate of issues, save for the one that has been debated throughout the hockey world this past week: player safety.

I'm not an alarmist, but the data does suggest it is time to review the matter. The Zdeno Chara hit not withstanding, it can't be denied that hitting is up and so are injuries, particularly concussions.

The GMs will not make concussions go away – if you don't want to get hurt, don't play the game – but they can help by methodically examining the factors that have lead to the predicament.

Faster game, more injuries

Number one on the list: Revisit the changes that were made enthusiastically but hastily in 2004.

The attempt during the lockout to open up the game has been as much a culprit as anything to bring us to this point. The red line was removed, impeding a forechecker was banned and goaltender puckhandling was minimized.

Besides developing a faster game, these changes cleared the way for bigger and more dangerous hits.

According to my colleagueon the Hotstove, Pierre LeBrun, hits are up by 40 per cent since the 2004 lockout. More hits, more concussions. How's that for a start? It will take more than that, but I assure that allowing for a bit of impeding, letting checkers employ their hands and arms in briefly locking up their check (as used to be the case) will go a long way to bringing back some moderation to the collisions we now see.

Clearly, they can't stop there. Take the time using a blue ribbon committee including players, coaches, managers, physicians and equipment manufacturers to examine all the aspects of the issue.

Can the seamless glass

And for goodness sake, look at the playing surface, boards and glass. Seamless glass is a joke. A bad joke.

When I was a manager on Long Island, the owners of the team in the late 1990s asked me about using seamless glass. "It's great. Look at the clarity! And in the long run it will be cheaper than Plexiglas because it holds up so well."

My response was simple. This stuff is no good. Too heavy. It's like hitting a brick wall. I told them that if they wanted to put it in that they could have me on record as being totally opposed to it. And by the way, while I have no data, I bet they lost tons more money due to player injury than they saved by using it.

Today the league has several teams that have seamless on the ends of their rinks. All of these teams are due to replace the seamless on the ends by next season. Should have been done long ago. But wait, seamless glass still exists all over the place on the sideboards. GET RID OF IT. The league has to take blame if a single player gets hurt playing in an arena with seamless glass.

Eliminate the glass partitions between the benches. Put a couple cops there and make the sanction for interacting (that means fighting) with the other team in that area a 40-game suspension. End of problem.

Onus on players, too

The GMs need to take a long and thorough look at safety issues and then, when changes get made, educate the players and public to the whys and wherefores of these changes.

The players don't care nearly enough about the rules of their game. Show them video. Tell them why the changes were made. Show them how to change their behaviour. Make them responsible. Always amuses me about the game: Players show up for work for about two or three hours a day for practice. Maybe we can impinge on their time for another few minutes to make sure they understand a bit more about the rules and the way the game can be played hard, but reasonably safely.

And, yes, look at the role fighting plays in the game and how much it has to do with the concussion issue. At the very least, find a way to make the five-minute, end-of-the-bench cowboy get back on his horse and ride over to the ultimate fighting ring.

Re-examine discipline

And for the love of god, please change the disciplinary process.

I have respect for what Colin Campbell and Mike Murphy have tried to do, but it is time to introduce a transparent process and standardized punishments. One game, three games, nine games? Silly, if well intended.

Whatever comes of these meetings, I do hope it will be productive. I am sick and tired to having to listen to the Monday morning radio shock jocks pretend they know hockey and bash the game.

Hey, did anyone see Pavel Datsyuk's goal the other night?! Did you see Ovie and Johansson on that give-and-go goal? Things of beauty. We have better talent than ever and I wish we would focus a little more on it.

Dean
M.Ed (Coaching)
Ch.P.C. (Chartered Professional Coach)
Game Intelligence Training
"Great education depends on great teaching."

[hockeygod]

Young hockey players hit the ice, then the books

INGRID PERITZ Shediac, N.B.— From Saturday's Globe and Mail
Published Friday, Mar. 11, 2011

The Atom hockey practice at the Shediac arena takes players through their skating, shooting and stick-handling drills. But the coach saves his most popular training tip for last.

Standing in the locker room after practice, coach Shane Doiron delivers his instructions to the roomful of nine- and 10-year-old boys, who’ve unlaced their skates and packed up their gear.

“Now,” he says, “we’re going to do our reading.”

The boys reach for books: The weekly Shediac Capitals reading circle is under way.

For three years, Mr. Doiron has parlayed his position as a hockey coach to instill a love of books among his grade-school charges. Driven by his own regrets at sidelining reading while he pursued a hockey career, he’s trying to get his players to find inspiration between the covers of books as much as on the ice.

In doing so, he’s using Canada’s game to overcome boys’ lagging reading scores.

“I spend hours and hours teaching them to skate and shoot pucks,” the 36-year-old coach says. “This teaches them life. It’s a gift.”

Mr. Doiron’s book club reaches to the heart of a critical problem in Canada. The literacy gap is growing between boys and girls, leaving boys trailing in the reading and writing skills they need for academic achievement.

The reading group in Shediac, a community outside Moncton on New Brunswick’s east coast, tries to avoid the pitfalls associated with boys’ disaffection for books.

Here, reading’s not a girly thing. The adulated male coach is a reader. And the players are given a selection of books to choose from, almost all of them about hockey and adventures. A favourite this year is Le Zamboni, about a junior goalie who enters the belly of an ice-smoothing machine and its magical dream machine.

Mr. Doiron insists on recruiting fathers for the club, which unfolds in the chummy atmosphere of the post-practice dressing room. When the coach gives the signal, the 17 team members split off into groups of threes and fours and huddle on the benches with a volunteer dad. At this week’s gathering, fathers leaned in to hear the boys’ animated talk about their reading. Mr. Doiron led one group, kneeling on the floor before a clutch of rapt boys, who were going over the action in a book about the exploits of a gang of young adventurers on a deserted island. (Most of the books are in French, the language of the boys’ schooling.)

Mr. Doiron asks the boys to spend about 20 minutes reading before bedtime. No one’s punished for not doing it, but they’re told they would be letting their teammates down.

“I tell them to finish the day with a good book.” Mr. Doiron says. “I explain that reading is part of exercise. The more you exercise your brain the better you think on the ice. But it’s not work, it’s fun.”

The recipe seems to work. Parents tell him their sons are picking up books unprompted, and their grades at school have improved.

“Sometimes my son will say to me, ‘Dad, let’s read, I’ve got to get my reading done,’ ” says Keith Allain, father of nine-year-old Samuel. “Before, reading for him was a chore. Now it’s part of his routine. I’ll see him grab a book.”

The boys seem to be won over. Pausing in his gear before heading onto the ice, 10-year-old Jason Gallant says he’s spending less time on his Xbox. “I read instead. When I’m bored I take a book.”

Mr. Doiron’s determination to put books in boys’ hands took root in his own experience with hockey. He grew up in a small community near Shediac, where boys like him lived and breathed the game. Reading, he recalls, just “wasn’t cool.”

His skills as a defenceman catapulted him to the major juniors, but by age 19 the dream of an NHL career had faded. He enrolled in university. That’s where, while trying to read a biology text for class, he realized his reading skills were too weak for him to keep up. “Here I was and I only knew one thing in life: hockey, and nothing else.”

Mr. Doiron stuck with his studies and graduated with honours in civil-engineering technology. And when he became a minor-hockey coach, he decided he would help give his players the opportunities he’d missed.

“I didn’t want them to be like I was at age 20. I wanted them to be able to make choices that I didn’t have,” says Mr. Doiron, a father of three who works for the federal government. “We have this great tool in Canada. It’s called hockey. We have it in every small town and village in this country. There have been too many horror stories about hockey coaches. Stories of abuse. I want hockey to do good.”

Mr. Doiron’s mix of no-nonsense authority and big-hearted commitment to his players seem to be key. His words carry the kind of weight that parents might envy.

“A hockey coach is like a demigod,” says Manon Jolicoeur, who wrote her master’s thesis at the University of Moncton on the Shediac reading circle. “When he says something, he doesn’t have to repeat it.”

Ms. Jolicoeur found that even “disengaged” boys who were initially the least interested in books signed on for the coach’s club. “Their parents didn’t have to remind them, like they did for school. When the boys read for the book club, they read for themselves.” She adds: “What’s interesting is that all of them, without exception, said the same thing, ‘On my next team, I’d like it if my coach asks me to read.’ ”

Each Monday, the preadolescent boys who file into the Shediac arena arrive with a freezer-sized Ziploc bag. It contains their book, a pencil and a notebook, in which they’ve jotted down notes or a drawing about that week’s reading. It’s become so entrenched that one boy, Félix LeBlanc, was sitting out the practice due to a knee injury this week but showed up clutching his Ziploc bag anyway.

That bag is, in many ways, a testament to Mr. Doiron’s success. “At the end of the year, if I’ve developed 17 kids on the ice and off the ice, it’s worth more than one championship. Because a championship is one day. Reading is for a lifetime.”

Maybe he should make it his mantra: He Shoots. He Reads. He Scores.

Dean
M.Ed (Coaching)
Ch.P.C. (Chartered Professional Coach)
Game Intelligence Training
"Great education depends on great teaching."

[hockeygod]

Neurosurgeon argues against hockey bodychecks: increased risk of brain injury

March 15, 2011 – 19:54 The Canadian Press

TORONTO – A mountain of evidence exists to show that bodychecking in hockey has detrimental effects, says a neurosurgeon who has compiled new statistics on kids' hockey injuries.

Young players were more than 10 times as likely to suffer a brain injury after Hockey Canada allowed body contact for the Atom age group in the 1998-1999 season, says the study published Tuesday by the journal Open Medicine.

Dr. Michael Cusimano of St. Michael's Hospital in Toronto and colleagues looked at data for 8,552 boys ages six to 17 who went to one of five hospital emergency departments in Ontario for hockey-related injuries over 10 seasons, before and after bodychecking rules were relaxed. The hospitals had all collected information as members of the Canadian Hospitals Injury Reporting and Prevention Program.

The researchers found that more than half of the injuries were related to bodychecking.

"And we found that certain groups were more vulnerable," Cusimano said in an interview.

"The group that had bodychecking first introduced, that is, the Atom group, they had the highest odds of sustaining a bodychecking related injury compared to the other groups.

"If we looked at the different types of injuries that occurred especially at that age group, that the odds ratio for a brain injury was 10 times after the rule change, as compared to before."

The Atom division was 10- and 11-year-olds in 1998-99, but the ages for the division changed to nine and 10 in 2002-03. The Hockey Canada website says the rule for bodychecking is now PeeWee and above — ages 11 and 12.

Cusimano said it's time to ask questions about the role of kids' hockey, and whether it is to create National Hockey League players, or it's for kids who won't go on to play major league hockey.

"If the goal is to create NHL players, we know that the chance of getting into the NHL is about one in 4,000 kids, so are we designing hockey for the one in 4,000 kids, or are we designing hockey for the other 3,999 other kids?" he asked.

Options that don't expose kids to risks of injury are needed for children who want to play at a high level of skill, he said. These kids and teens would then have all the benefits of hockey, including fun, teamwork and physical fitness.

Paul Carson, vice-president of hockey development at Hockey Canada, said the study numbers are interesting and worth noting, but he observed that they cover the period 1994 to 2004.

A lot of good programs have been put in place since then, he said, including checking clinics at the branch level, as well as checking resources and concussion seminars.

"I think all research is important, and Hockey Canada certainly values the contributions of the research in the medical communities," he said in an interview from Calgary.

"It provides us with the type of information that we need to review, and we need to be very much a part of paying attention to, in terms of creating a safe environment for participants."

Cusimano said recent concussions sustained by Pittsburgh star Sidney Crosby and Montreal Canadiens forward Max Pacioretty have put the spotlight on the issue once again.

Crosby is one of the best players in the world and knows how to give and take a bodycheck, he noted.

"If it can happen to him, it can happen to anybody and all of a sudden there's a name to that silent face of brain injury, of the thousands of kids who sustain brain injury every year," Cusimano said.

"I think we have to ask groups that are involved in hockey, like Hockey Canada, like the NHL, is when are they going to take a leadership position that reduces the risk to children and youth?"

Carson said it brings to the forefront, particularly for minor league parents and participants, the need to pay attention to concussions — "for example, that we don't just shrug off a blow to the head as a bump, and possibly a mild concussion, but that we recognize it as a potential injury, and we need to deal with it properly."

Theresa Dostaler, who runs the website Hockey Mom in Canada, says she's interested in knowing what can be done within body contact hockey to reduce injuries.

"I don't disagree with the authors' claims that it's not a good thing to start body contact early, like in Atom. I'm happy to see it held off till PeeWee," she said from her home in Madoc, Ont.

"But I'm not sure that you can remove body contact from hockey entirely. So if that's the case, then how do we make it safer for players?"

Her two sons, ages six and eight, play hockey, and she also has a three-year-old daughter.

Dostaler was on her way out the door to see a game between the Ottawa Senators and Pittsburgh Penguins; ironically, she was only able to get the tickets because the injured Crosby wasn't playing.

The NHL could go further to ensure players aren't subjected to hits to the head or checked if they don't have the puck, she said.

"At lower levels, I think it's about proper coaching and the coaches sending out the right messages, and I also think there's a role for proper equipment."

Dean
M.Ed (Coaching)
Ch.P.C. (Chartered Professional Coach)
Game Intelligence Training
"Great education depends on great teaching."

[hockeygod]

Hitting younger not always better

From Wednesday's Globe and Mail HAYLEY MICK Published Tuesday, Mar. 15, 2011

In his latest study on hockey injuries, Michael Cusimano has zeroed in on an old debate: can allowing bodychecking at a younger age improve safety by teaching kids to hit properly?

The study, published Tuesday in the journal Open Medicine, centred around the 1998-99 youth hockey season, when Hockey Canada lowered the legal age for body contact to include Atom-level players. The rule change introduced boys as young as nine to the hits. (Previously, only those aged 12 years and older could bodycheck. The rules have since been reversed so the earliest age of allowable body contact is with 11-year-old Pee Wee players.)

Dr. Cusimano, a neurosurgeon and researcher at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto, and his colleagues found that the Atom-aged kids were more than two times as likely to be injured from bodychecking after the rule changes took effect. Interestingly, the rate of head injuries increased by 26 per cent overall, including in the older age groups. Head and necks were among the body parts that saw the biggest jump in injury rates.

The results were based on a total of 8,552 hockey-related injuries reported at five Ontario hospitals during a 10-year period beginning in 1994. Injuries reported before the rule change were compared to those suffered after the rule change in players ages nine to 17.

The take-home message: “If we want to protect kids’ brains, then we need to seriously consider what is the value of allowing bodychecking in youth hockey,” Dr. Cusimano says.

Dr. Cusimano detailed the findings for The Globe and Mail from Toronto.

You found that the odds of being injured increased in all age groups after the rule change, but the most significant increase happened with Atom players, when kids were first exposed to bodychecking. Why do you think that is?

As soon as you expose a person to a risk, then you see a big jump. But the risk doesn’t go down later. It stays up. In fact, in some of the older age groups, the risk was also higher as well.

So is it possible that the increased risk of injury from bodychecking has nothing to do with age?

That’s right. If [body checking was first allowed at] age 18, [the increase] would probably have occurred when they were 18. If it was six, it probably would have occurred when they were six.

Can you continue that thought? Are you saying that bodychecking is just inherently dangerous, no matter how old you are?

I think there’s some truth in that. If you’ve got three-year-old kids who are doing it, there’s probably no intention in the three-year-olds to hurt each other. They haven’t developed that culture yet … they just want to have fun. Whereas by the time they get to 10, 11 years old, they’re starting to understand the culture of winning and the culture of what they’re supposed to be doing out there. So it would manifest there.

In your paper, you point to several other studies that have showed that “learning to bodycheck at a younger age does not reduce a player’s odds of injury.” You add that allowing kids to start bodychecking earlier only prolongs their exposure to risk. But some people still argue that you can prevent injuries by teaching kids to bodycheck properly. Why do you think that idea persists?

I think it’s just a lack of understanding of what the data says. Who do you think are the best bodycheckers are in the world?

NHL players?

And who do you think has the highest rate of concussion in the world?

NHL players?

Well, if they knew how to give and take a check the best of anybody, why wouldn’t their rates be one of the lowest rates? It doesn’t have to do with learning to give or take a bodycheck. Look at Sidney Crosby. Is there any player in the world who has more skill than Crosby? Maybe [Alexander] Ovechkin. Maybe not. That’s like putting the blame on the player who receives the bodycheck. That’s a total misunderstanding of the inherent risk of the practice.

Maybe what they’re saying is that the people who are doing the bodychecking don’t know how do it properly.

Well, the same argument goes for the NHL then. Those guys know how to give a bodycheck. Those guys certainly know how to put Sidney Crosby out. And [Zdeno] Chara certainly knows how to put out [Max] Pacioretty. They know how to give it and they know how to take it, but the fact is, people are still getting injured. And ultimately the game is getting injured and damaged. Because if you’re a mother or father with a young child, you’re going to think twice … the kids are leaving the sport.

You’ve been sounding the alarm about violence in hockey for a long time, but have you noticed that the conversation has changed in the past year?

I think things are shifting. I think things like the Sidney Crosby event is sort of shifting the whole focus as well. People are coming around to recognizing: What’s the value in this practice of allowing kids to get their brains injured? And really, brains are our most precious resource. So why should we tolerate that?

NOTE: The script of this conversation has been edited and condensed.

Dean
M.Ed (Coaching)
Ch.P.C. (Chartered Professional Coach)
Game Intelligence Training
"Great education depends on great teaching."

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Ban on all hits to head not in cards, yet

ROY MACGREGOR BOCA RATON, FLA.— From Wednesday's Globe and Mail
Published Tuesday, Mar. 15, 2011

There are 31 general managers gathered around the table in South Florida, where the NHL is reconsidering its rules in light of heightened concerns about concussions.

That’s 30 GMs of existing franchises, and one seat for the 30-million-or-so Canadians who consider themselves astute general managers when it comes to hockey. As for those many Canadians who don’t care about their national game, their vote goes by proxy to those few Americans, relatively speaking, who do.

But make no mistake, public opinion has had a say – even if not as much as it had hoped.

“Sometimes,” said Brendan Shanahan, the former player who is now a league vice-president, “when the public gets so focused on something like that, it improves the climate for change.”

Shanahan was quick to point out, however, the league had already been examining its stance well prior to such recent attention-grabbing incidents as the Jan. 1 concussion that has kept Sidney Crosby, the NHL’s best player, out of action, and the March 8 hit by Boston Bruins defenceman Zdeno Chara that put Montreal Canadiens forward Max Pacioretty on a stretcher, leading to massive public outcry, particularly in Quebec, when the league decided no supplementary discipline against Chara was required.

Shanahan equated the situation to receiving a call to play golf “and you’re already on the 14th tee.”

“This meeting was happening with or without the Chara hit,” he said. “We didn't just drum up 15 years of evidence and data over the last seven days.”

All the same, the public concern – echoed by politicians such as Prime Minister Stephen Harper and hockey legend Ken Dryden, as well as by such pivotal NHL sponsors as Air Canada and Via Rail Canada Inc. – has rippled like the ocean itself along the beach where three days of meetings will sew up Wednesday.

Though there has been a widespread call to ban all hits to the head – as Dryden put it: “It’s time to stop being stupid” – the league refused to go that distance, though it did take a few promising steps in the right direction.

On Monday, commissioner Gary Bettman presented a five-point plan that included improvements on concussion diagnosis, improving the safety of boards and glass surrounding NHL rinks and spreading the responsibility for actions beyond the players to coaches and perhaps even team owners.

“Teams have got to take responsibility for the actions of their players,” said Pittsburgh Penguins GM Ray Shero, whose club owner, Mario Lemieux, has recommended large fines be imposed on teams that fail to comply.

“The game constantly evolves,” Shanahan said Tuesday. He believes such “tweaking” will become a regular occurrence every few years for the league.

The GMs simply could not agree after a second day of discussions on any rule that would apply to all hits to the head – though a handful of the 30, including Shero, are known to favour such a ban.

Toronto Maple Leafs GM Brian Burke said there was no appetite for “a blanket ban” as such hits can also come from a perfectly legal body check. The league maintains most concussions this year have come from legal hits, though there is much public debate over what should be legal and what not.

Burke maintained the gathering needed to avoid “changing the fabric of the game,” while at the same time improving safety in what has always been and must remain a tough, physical sport.

So while many fans will be disappointed the NHL has not seen fit to join lesser leagues that forbid all hits to the head – accidental or not – fans who favour safer hockey may be slightly mollified by Tuesday’s initiative to return to, and enforce, a couple of long-standing rules.

For as long as the game has been played, there have been rules against “charging” and “boarding,” but in recent decades both rules have largely fallen by the wayside. Charging, for instance, used to be deemed when a player had taken at least three quick strides to hit another – while today, with the game far faster, players are more often “coasting” at high speed when they take aim at an opponent.

NHL senior vice-president of hockey operations Colin Campbell says the idea of looking again at these two old rules came when one player – Ottawa Senators centre Jason Spezza – happened to ask at a committee meeting: “What exactly is boarding?”

Even Steve Yzerman, the Tampa Bay Lightning GM who starred for two decades in the league, said “Prior to today’s meeting I maybe had read the rule” – but had little understanding of it.

The two penalties are rule 41 (boarding) and rule 42 (charging), each broken down into a long list of definitions and variations, depending on severity. Boarding is called to penalize a player who checks in manner that causes the opponent “to be thrown violently into the boards.” Charging is called when a player covers come distance to “violently check” an opponent.

Ottawa Senators GM Bryan Murray says the rules are better understood if they move beyond “violent” and simply focus on the “disregard” of one player for the safety of another. “We want stronger rulings,” he said.

The other GMs agreed, saying, come summer, recommendations will be made that, by next season, the league will call such penalties and supplementary discipline in the form of more suspensions and longer suspensions will be in place.

Murray said he had suggested it was time “to rethink” the red line, perhaps bringing the two-line pass back to slow up attacking players, but it went nowhere.

As for the call to allow defencemen more latitude in obstructing attacking players to slow matters down, it, too, failed. “If you let a little of it go,” Murray said of allowing obstruction back into the game, “it would be a lot before too long.”

“We have rules,” Shanahan said. “We’re going to call the rules.”

“There’s work to be done,” Bettman added.

For the public GM, as well – full-time work in prodding the NHL to continue with these welcome early steps until the national game gets to where the nation wants it.

And where the players, of every age, need it.

Dean
M.Ed (Coaching)
Ch.P.C. (Chartered Professional Coach)
Game Intelligence Training
"Great education depends on great teaching."

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The WHL and concussions: A mother cries out for help

Wednesday, March 16, 2011 Gregg Drinnan – Taking Note…Kamloops Sports

When Zdeno Chara ran Max Pacioretty into a turnbuckle in Montreal one night last week, who could have anticipated the aftermath?

Sheesh, even Air Canada and Via Rail got into the act, as did, predictably, the odd spotlight-seeking politician.

When things like this happen in places like Montreal and Boston, or Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, the tendency in our little corner of the world is to yawn, shrug and move on.

But if you are a fan of this great game of ours, perhaps you should be concerned. Because the rules changed this month.

When Boston University’s Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy revealed that the brain of former NHL enforcer Bob Probert exhibited "the same degenerative disease, chronic traumatic encephalopathy" that is connected to multiple concussions, the curtains were pulled back to reveal a whole new world.

Who in this generation could relate to CTE having been found in the brain of Reggie Fleming, who played in the NHL in the 1960s? Probert, though, is a different story. He’s recent. He’s more relevant.

That this news came with Sidney Crosby, the best player in the world, struggling with post-concussion syndrome only intensified the glare of the spotlight.

The WHL, if you haven’t noticed, isn’t a whole lot different than the NHL. Oh, the NHL’s players may be bigger, faster and more skilled, and they may get paid more, but the problems are the same.

And just like head shots and accompanying injuries are an epidemic in the NHL, they are an epidemic in the WHL.

In fact, a case can be made that concussions are more prevalent in the WHL than in the NHL.

No official numbers are available regarding the NHL, but the 30-team league has acknowledged that there have been about 80 players diagnosed with concussions this season.

The 22-team WHL’s weekly injury list, dated March 15, shows 11 players out with what are described as concussions or head injuries. That’s down from 21 the previous week. A study of this season’s 24 injury reports shows at least 97 instances in which a player has been shown as being out with a concussion or head injury. Eight players have twice been so injured, while one player appears to have had three head injuries.

The count also includes at least three players whose concussions have been season-ending.

And now the mother of a WHL player is wondering when enough is enough.

An email from her contains the subject line: Who killed Davey Moore?

———
Davey Moore, an American featherweight boxer, died of inoperable brain damage on March 25, 1963, four days after losing a bout at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles.

Shortly after, Bob Dylan penned the ballad Who Killed Davey Moore?

“Who killed Davey Moore?
Why an’ what’s the reason for?”

During the course of the song, the referee, the angry crowd, Moore’s manager, the gambling man, the boxing writer and Moore’s opponent all deny complicity in the boxer’s death.

———
“I am the mother of a WHL player and I feel sick watching our children inflicting and receiving potentially life altering injuries and saying nothing,” she wrote.

This being hockey, of course, she asked for anonymity “in order not to damage my child’s chances.”

The email and subsequent communications reveal a woman who is heartbroken at what she is witnessing as hockey becomes more and more violent, although not in the bench-clearing ways of days of yore.

No, her son hasn’t suffered a concussion or head injury this season. But she has seen enough, just the same.

“The players work so hard to get to the WHL that we as parents are loathe to get in the way of their success,” she wrote. “So we stand by and watch a 19-year-old have a seizure on the ice in the name of entertainment for the crowd.

“Then a 16-year-old is being punched by a 19-year-old and the crowd is delighted.

“We all know this is not right. How can we as parents send our kids into this and not object to the failure of this league to adequately protect them? Nobody is protecting our children. These are not consenting adults with million dollar contracts and a players association.”

In Kamloops this season, we have watched as two players had their seasons ended by especially violent physical encounters.

First, on Dec. 10, Kamloops right-winger Jordan DePape drilled Swift Current forward Killian Hutt with a blind-side hit that drew a five-game suspension. Hutt went into convulsions, left the ice on a stretcher and spent a night in hospital. He was left with a severe concussion and, although he has skated, isn’t symptom free and won’t play again this season.

Then, on Feb. 4, Blazers defenceman Austin Madaisky was spun around and checked into the boards by Chilliwack Bruins defenceman Brandon Manning. Madaisky escaped a concussion but was left with a non-displaced fracture of the seventh cervicular vertebrae. Manning served a seven-game suspension; Madaisky continues to wear an Aspen collar and will for another couple of weeks. If the injury continues to heal properly, he will avoid surgery and will be back on the ice over the summer.

“When there is a spinal injury people will say, ‘That's hockey,’ ” the mother wrote. “But that's not true. These are preventable injuries and we are not even trying to prevent them; in fact, the WHL profits off them by catering to the bizarre tastes of some people in the crowd.

“This is not acceptable. These are our children. We are all responsible to them — parents, reporters, coaches, etc.

“They trust us and we betray that trust. When the consequences of those concussions hit home there will be no cheering crowds.”

Dean
M.Ed (Coaching)
Ch.P.C. (Chartered Professional Coach)
Game Intelligence Training
"Great education depends on great teaching."

[hockeygod]

Hockey Hall of Famer Bryan Trottier gets cornered

By Cory Wolfe, The StarPhoenix March 17, 2011

As a regular feature, StarPhoenix reporter Cory Wolfe gets personal with a sports figure. Today, Hockey Hall of Famer Bryan Trottier gets cornered. Trottier won the Stanley Cup seven times — four with the Islanders, two with Pittsburgh, and one as an assistant coach with Colorado.

The SP: Saskatoon Blades coach Lorne Molleken, who was your junior teammate in Swift Current, says you used to walk around with 10-pound weights on your legs.

Trottier: As that story gets told, those weights get heavier and heavier. (Laughs) I had a cousin, Pat Trottier, who was a basketball player and he handed the weights over to me. They were five-pound weights. He said, “If you jog in these or run with these, your skates will feel a little lighter.”

The SP: You played 18 NHL seasons, but rewind to the beginning. What was your welcome-to-the-NHL moment?

Trottier: There were so many wild moments that first year. But one thing that really stood out was being in Buffalo at the old Aud. I was in a stare-down with Jim Schoenfeld and Jerry Korab. I thought, “OK, if I back down now, I’ll be backing down for the rest of my career.” But they both kind of peeled away and I thought, “Oh, that’s not so bad.” Then I turned around and (Islanders teammate) Clark GIllies was looking over my shoulder. I was like, “Thank you, God!” That was my big brother moment.

The SP: You’ve said that the first time you laid hands on the Stanley Cup, your “sense of touch was magnified.”

Trottier: It wasn’t only the sense of touch; it was all of your senses. Your eyesight wanted to take in the moment. And your sense of smell . . . you know how awful the jerseys and the equipment smell in the locker-room after? You’d never noticed it before. And there’s the taste of drinking champagne out of the Cup. But feeling the Cup for the first time, you feel the names and you feel the coolness of the Cup to the touch . . . and the weight. I didn’t realize it weighed that much. I thought it was tinny, but it weighs about 40 pounds.

The SP: Who was the most under-rated member of the New York Islanders’ dynasty that won four Cups in the 1980s?

Trottier: Probably (defenceman) Gordie Lane. He played on the edge and he made the other team keep their heads up. He was dependable every game. You knew how he was going to play, and when he was going back for the puck, you knew which way he was going with it. He’d look to the wall or look to the middle and we better be there or he let us hear it. He made us accountable and we liked that.

The SP: You played for some legendary coaches including Al Arbour, “Badger” Bob Johnson and Scotty Bowman. Describe a memorable pep talk from one of those guys.

Trottier: Bob Johnson was pretty much like (former Philadelphia Flyers coach) Freddie Shero, (who said,) “Win today and we walk together forever.” I remember that in Minnesota vividly (during the 1991 Cup run with Pittsburgh). Al Arbour would say, “Guys, we’re not playing for the whole world; we’re playing for ourselves.” Al always reminded us, “Hey, there’s lots of things going on in the world today, but we’ll block them out. The roof could cave in here today and we’re to stick to our game plan.”

The SP: You played against Wayne Gretzky in his prime and with Mario Lemieux during his. Which guy would you most like to build a team around?

Trottier: That is a great question. Geez, I tell ya, if you want someone who is going to beat you one-on-one, grab Mario. If you want someone who is going to control the puck and has great vision, Gretzky. Both of them had so many dimensions to their games. . . . Probably a better guy to ask would be Paul Coffey.

The SP: Yes, because he played with both of them.

Trottier: And one is a right-hander and one is a left-hander, so that’ll make Paul really stutter on that one.

The SP: You gained a reputation as one of the best all-around players in NHL history. What drove your attention to defensive detail?

Trottier: That’s my Saskatchewan roots, I think. I played defence, too, so I was always cognizant of the goalie. And my dad (Buzz) was always one of those guys who said, “If you’re playing forward, you have to backcheck for the goalie.” It was a constant mantra. And I think it’s just Saskatchewan folks. They’re really blue-collar and have that farming mentality. They appreciate hustle and good, hard work.

The SP: Final question. You scored 595 NHL goals, playoffs included. Pick one that stands out above all others.

Trottier: Probably the first one. It was against Rogie Vachon (of the Los Angeles Kings). That’s what you dream about, scoring your first NHL goal. But the five-second goal in Boston was really cool. No. 500 was really cool. There’s five-goal games against the Rangers and Philadelphia. And the year I scored 50 was really cool. . . . There were a lot of great goals, but the first one is probably a little sweeter than the rest.

Dean
M.Ed (Coaching)
Ch.P.C. (Chartered Professional Coach)
Game Intelligence Training
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Mark Recchi is the Marathon man

JAMES MIRTLE
TORONTO— From Saturday's Globe and Mail
Published Friday, Mar. 18, 2011

There will be a record chase taking place on Saturday at the Air Canada Centre as the Toronto Maple Leafs play host to the Boston Bruins, although the man at the centre of the pursuit isn’t certain where he is or what number he’s headed for.

All Mark Recchi knows is that the more games he plays, the more text messages he gets from friends around the league with kudos for hitting yet another milestone.

The 43-year-old Bruin winger’s latest feat was moving into fifth in NHL games played, passing Dave Andreychuk on Tuesday with his 1,640 regular-season game.

His phone started buzzing soon after he got off the ice.

“My buddies text me all the time, ‘you’re about to catch this guy, in this or goals or whatever,’” Recchi said. “I have no idea. But friends keep me in the loop.

“My Dad actually told me last night how many it is to pass Chelios.”

Chelios being Chris Chelios, the grizzled defenceman who finally retired last summer at age 48, setting several longevity records of his own along the way.

Saturday’s game will leave Recchi only nine games back of Chelios’s games-played mark, one he will pass by the end of the season, barring injury.

And while he won’t say it outright, Recchi appears to have every intention of continuing to play beyond this season, perhaps even long enough to challenge Hall of Famer Gordie Howe’s NHL record of 1,767 games played.

Not bad for a fourth-round pick many felt was too small to play in the NHL when he was drafted – at age 20 – by the Pittsburgh Penguins 23 years ago.

“It’s been great,” Recchi said. “More than I could ever imagine, really.”

Recchi’s teammates, past and present, all marvel that he’s going strong, still rarely missing a game – his last long-term injury was in 2000 – and playing 16 minutes a night with one of the better teams in the league.

“Before I played with him, you always knew he was one of the great players, but you thought he was getting a little old,” said Tampa Bay Lightning star Steven Stamkos.

“Then you play with him and see how hard he works and how much he loves the game. He’s still going 100 miles an hour out there, still competing and he’s still got that fiery edge that he’s always had. That’s what’s keeping him young and why he’s playing so well.”

Hearing Recchi’s name, Stamkos’s teammate Ryan Malone’s face lit up, and he started to tell his own story of idolizing The Wrecking Ball growing up in Pittsburgh.

“I used his sticks growing up, when I was 13, 14 and they were winning the Cups,” Malone said. “Then I got a chance to play with him, really got to see what a great hockey player he is and what a great person.”

With 575 goals, 954 assists and 1,529 points – 19th, 13th and 13th in league history – Recchi is approaching more than just games played milestones. He passed Mike Bossy’s goals mark last month and sits two points behind Paul Coffey for 12th in career scoring.

While Recchi’s contract is up at the end of the season and no talks have yet been held with the Bruins, he has emerged as a mentor to rookie Tyler Seguin – just as he did with Stamkos and Jordan Staal in previous stops – and clearly enjoys that role.

Feeling old, meanwhile, hasn’t been a problem.

“I don’t really feel any different,” Recchi said. “I act like I’m 25.”

(He gives away his age in a recent profile in Sports Illustrated, however: “All these guys play Nintendos, Facebooks and Twitters,” he said of his younger teammates. “I have no idea and I don’t plan on having any idea.”)

As for what’s next, Recchi isn’t telling, other than to reveal that he would be willing to play a third- or fourth-line role down the line, as long as he feels part of a team’s success.

With only 125 games for him to catch Howe, several of Recchi’s peers said this week that the career games played record would be a fitting cap to his career.

“I hope he can keep playing,” Malone said. “Just to see him, not only to last so long, but to have an impact on the game every night, to play such a big role on that team is as impressive as anything else.

“Now that he’s lasted so long and been so consistent, he should be singled out as one of the top players to play.”

Dean
M.Ed (Coaching)
Ch.P.C. (Chartered Professional Coach)
Game Intelligence Training
"Great education depends on great teaching."

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Females more susceptible to concussion, studies suggest

ANNE McILROY
SCIENCE REPORTER— From Saturday's Globe and Mail
Published Friday, Mar. 18, 2011

When Katie Weatherston caught an edge and fell during a game of pick-up hockey two years ago, the Olympic gold medalist knew she had sustained another concussion.

Her head wasn’t right; she felt foggy and dizzy. The symptoms didn’t go away and Weatherston, a member of the team that won gold in Turin in 2006, lost her chance to make it to the Vancouver Olympics.

“I still get symptoms,” the 27-year-old says. “I’ve been in the postconcussion phase for two years.”

Evidence is mounting that women, who are more likely than men to suffer a sports-related concussion, also have more severe symptoms in the days immediately following the injury. But what about the months and years afterward?

That’s what the University of Montreal’s Dave Ellemberg and his colleagues are investigating. They say their research could point to a need for rule changes in women’s sports and lead to gender-specific protocols to determine when it’s safe for females to return to the rink or the soccer pitch.

“The current clinical assessment protocols and return to play guidelines, which are almost entirely based on research with male athletes, are not only inappropriate for women but likely place them at a greater risk of suffering multiple concussions and experiencing long-term consequences of their injuries,” Ellemberg says.

Researchers in Canada and the United States say they don’t know why women are more vulnerable to sports-related concussions, but factors may include weaker necks, subtle differences in brain chemistry, and differences in the way females are coached or train.

With almost $400,000 in funding from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, Ellemberg’s team is tracking concussed male and female university athletes for two years or more to compare their symptoms, cognitive deficits, impairments in balance and anomalies in the electrical activity of their brains.

Concussions occur when there is a rapid acceleration or deceleration of the head. The brain moves or rotates inside the skull and different parts of it move against each other. Symptoms include headaches, confusion, amnesia and sensitivity to light or noise and can last days, weeks or months.

The National Hockey League is under intense pressure to come up with rule changes to reduce the number of concussions, also known as mild traumatic brain injuries, which have been linked to dementia later in life.

Far less attention has been paid to women athletes.

But female university athletes in the United States who play soccer, basketball, lacrosse and hockey have a higher risk of getting concussed than their male counterparts, says Tracey Covassin, a Canadian researcher at Michigan State University who began to study concussions in female athletes a decade ago. She says it is still not clear how much greater that risk is, but Ellemberg says evidence suggests that women are three times more likely than men to suffer a sports-related concussion.

In 2005, a team of American researchers reported that female high school and university athletes were almost twice as likely as men to show cognitive impairment, such as slower reaction times, following a concussion.

The studies have all been with high school and university athletes. Researchers don’t know if young girls are more likely to get concussions than boys.

There are hints in the scientific literature about brain differences between men and women that may somehow be related to concussions. Women generally take longer to emerge from a general anesthetic than men, Ellemberg says, and animal studies suggest the female brain is more fragile, at least immediately following an injury.

Ellemberg also suspects that differences in coaching and training play a role. For example, because there is no checking in women’s hockey, girls tend not to practise how to take a hit. This may mean they are less able to brace themselves if a collision can’t be avoided.

Covassin is involved in a large American study of high school and university athletes to see if females take longer to recover from a concussion than males.

There are risks associated with all sports and all kinds of physical activity, Covassin says, and no one wants girls or women to stop playing hockey, soccer or other sports. She suspects that female athletes are getting more concussions because they are stronger, faster and more aggressive than in the past. Women are also more likely to be honest about their symptoms, she says, since unlike their male counterparts, they don’t risk losing lucrative professional contracts if they are injured.

But they do risk losing their shot at athletic glory.

Weatherston, who runs a hockey school for girls in the Ottawa area, had her first concussion in 2006 when she was cross-checked from behind during a practice and went into the boards head first. She couldn’t play for three months.

Then, in December of 2008, came the minor fall that jarred her brain and killed her dream of Olympic gold in Vancouver.

“It was devastating not to play,” she says.

Dean
M.Ed (Coaching)
Ch.P.C. (Chartered Professional Coach)
Game Intelligence Training
"Great education depends on great teaching."

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Darcy Regier’s goal is to eliminate concussions in hockey

ROY MacGREGOR
BOCA RATON, FLA.— From Saturday's Globe and Mail
Published Friday, Mar. 18, 2011

They call him Rain Man.

The reference is to the 1988 Dustin Hoffman-Tom Cruise movie and the character Raymond, who could tell you how much snow fell on a January day 20 years ago or could recite the telephone number of a person he just met, all thanks to studying the telephone book each night.

The tag comes courtesy of National Hockey League senior vice-president Colin Campbell. The 29 other league general managers think it’s funny, and Darcy Regier, general manager of the Buffalo Sabres since 1997, doesn’t mind at all.

When it comes to concussion talk, Regier is hockey’s equivalent of Raymond, who liked to dare people to drop a box of matches on the floor so he could instantly calculate how many spilled.

“I don’t have an accounting background,” the 54-year-old former defenceman says on a sunny day as the NHL wrapped up three days of talks on the head injuries that have plagued the league this winter. “But if I’m trying to figure something out and I don’t have a context for it, I usually end up gravitating toward numbers.”

The NHL is closing in on 100 concussions this year, almost all of them caused by the collision of two players.

“We average probably 45 hits in an NHL game,” Regier calculates as he talks. “And there’s 1,230 games in a season, so that makes up somewhere in the range of 50,000 hits.”

Regier is the NHL’s leading dove, one of three general managers who speak openly of banning all hits to the head (the others are the Pittsburgh Penguins’ Ray Shero and Carolina Hurricanes’ Jim Rutherford). Regier is also one of a larger group who argued, successfully, for the steps taken so far: last year’s Rule 48, which banned blindside hits, and this year’s decision to have a doctor rather than a trainer determine the seriousness of a hit to the head. They also led the push for this week’s decision to begin calling more boarding and charging penalties next season.

“For me,” Regier says, “the goal is to eliminate concussions. I could say, ‘Reduce those 100 to 20, or to 10,’ but the goal should be to eliminate entirely. I think ultimately we have to take a 360 approach [full protection from all sides] to protect the head.

“So, in a perfect world, I would like to be able to go in and just pull out those 100 concussions from the 50,000 hits and say, ‘Okay, now we’re at 49,900 hits and we haven’t changed the game. You’re missing 100 hits and we have eliminated all the concussions, and we didn’t hurt the game.’”

He knows, however, that this is dreaming.

“It’s not practical,” Regier says. “It’s not possible.”

There will always be accidental injuries. Players run into their own teammates. Players fall and strike their heads on the ice. Fighting remains a part of the game despite arguments in favour of banning it.

“That probably means we’re not getting to zero,” Regier says. But that is not to say that the goal of elimination is lost.

“The question is, to what extent can we manage it?” he says. “By this I mean where are most of these hits happening? Where on the ice? Is it close to the boards? Is it a result of charging? Is it a result of the [back-of-the-net] trapezoid, meaning that the goalies don’t come out to play pucks any more? Is it a result of having taken the centre line out?”

He saw, as lately all have noted, how the game changed after new rules were implemented following the 2004-05 lockout. By calling obstruction, the game sped up, which led to more violent collisions, which led to more concussions.

“I’ve been around long enough,” Regier says, “to know that if we don’t do the work and the studying, when we make changes, you might get lucky enough to hit that which you’ve tried to change – you might. But you can be guaranteed that there will be a lot of side effects, or unintended, unexpected consequences. So, for me it becomes really important that someone has to do a lot of work.”

Regier’s passion for studying cause and effect comes from personal experience. The native of Swift Current, Sask., suffered his first concussion as a junior playing for Prince Albert when he lost a fight in Regina and found himself sitting in the penalty box without the slightest notion of where he was. The coach sent Regier and backup goaltender Roland Boutin to the dressing room, where Boutin kept asking Regier where he was and Regier couldn’t answer. “I can remember sitting there guessing,” Regier says. “I was certainly conscious, but I had no idea where I was. And Rollie thought that was the funniest thing. He would repeat the question, ‘Do you know where you are?’ and I kept guessing. They had a lot of fun with it.

“Next day I was back at practice.”

That, of course, was standard treatment for concussion in those days: laugh it off, shake it off.

Regier turned professional and bounced around the minor leagues for years as part of the New York Islanders’ organization when the Islanders were a dynasty. He appeared in a handful of NHL games. When he joined management – first with the Islanders and, in 1997, becoming general manager of the Sabres – he had first-hand experiences with two of the game’s best-known concussion situations. First was with the Islanders, when Brett Lindros, younger brother of Eric, was forced to retire at 20 after a series of concussions.

“It was scary,” Regier says.

In the second instance, he traded Pat LaFontaine to the New York Rangers from Buffalo when the Sabres’ medical staff recommended that the star player should call it a career after so many concussions and LaFontaine believed he could still play. He went to New York but soon was forced to call it quits.

The concussion that really brought it all home for Regier, however, had nothing to do with professional hockey, but was a blow that passed by all but unnoticed in pee wee hockey. Regier’s son Jarrett was excelling in both tennis and hockey until, seven years ago, it all changed.

“He was very competitive,” Regier says of his third and youngest child. “And one day I noticed he wasn’t competing. He was small and ended up playing against bigger kids. His response when I was trying to understand why he had lost his competitiveness was ‘Dad, I don’t ever want to feel like that again.’ It was a concussion he was dealing with.

“As a parent you immediately move to ‘Wait a minute, is this worth it?’ In his case, hockey was his secondary sport, not his primary sport. His primary sport was tennis. At that point I started really to try to understand how badly he wanted to play hockey, because in my own mind I didn’t think it was going to be worth him dealing with that.”

Jarrett dropped out of hockey and is, today at 18, a promising young tennis player. Since that moment, Regier has tried to read everything he can on concussions and their aftermath.

“I had no idea of the magnitude,” he says.

He also believes that the hockey world, in particular the NHL, has no true sense of the overall effect of increased concussion awareness and the tsunami of public opinion that has risen up in recent weeks.

“We’re in a world now where people are voicing their opinions,” he says. “People recognize that they have a voice and they’re taking the responsibility for that voice. It might not all be rational, it might not all be objective, but the one-person one-vote thing has become a lot more real than it used to be.

“So I wonder what that means for things like our sport? Does it more strongly connect our society with our sport, and our responsibility back to it, however that might be interpreted?”

While he did not get what he had hoped for in this week’s meetings, he remains convinced that at some point the NHL will move to penalize all hits to the head, accidental or not.

“I’ve seen a shift in general managers over the years,” he says, “which I think is to try to understand more, to be more collaborative in nature, to be less confrontational and not to take a stand on a line in the sand.”

In discussions with hockey people at the junior ranks, he says there is a growing sense that this ever-flowing mass of information and opinion is having an impact. Parents are telling the traditionally physical junior hockey world that, “If you’re not going to look after the well-being of the players, their fathers, and probably to a greater extent their mothers, are going to have them go and play in an equally competitive and safer environment.” It could mean college hockey, it could mean another sport.

Regier says he and many other NHL leaders are acutely aware of their responsibility to the game as awareness concerning head injuries grows and public opinion shifts. It affects his everyday job.

“It’s a huge deal,” he says. “It is very big and it impacts a lot of areas. And that’s why it’s critical that we spend a lot of time on it and pay a lot of attention to it. And get it right.

“We need to get the concussion right and get the care right and get the player back playing.

“First of all, though, there should be no concussion if it can be prevented.”

Dean
M.Ed (Coaching)
Ch.P.C. (Chartered Professional Coach)
Game Intelligence Training
"Great education depends on great teaching."

[Tom Molloy]

Mosston developed a spectrum of learning styles from the command to self directed learner.
http://physicaleducationresources.com/teachingstylesmosstonpe.aspx is a link that tells about the styles.

A concise summary of the spectrum is at.
http://www.docstoc.com/docs/21697219/Mosstons-Spectrum-Of-Teaching-Styles

Mosston's Spectrum of Teaching Styles in Physical Education

The Spectrum offers a range of options to teachers that can accommodate students' diverse learning
styles and meet the learning intentions of a teaching session more accurately. The table below shows the range
of styles in the Spectrum and illustrates one of its key aspects: Matching the appropriate teaching style to the
learning intentions (outcomes) of a lesson.

Command – Teacher makes all decisions

Practice – Students carry out teacher-prescribed tasks

Reciprocal – Students work in pairs: one performs, the other provides
feedback

Self-check – Students assess their own performance against criteria

Inclusion – Teacher planned. Student monitors own work.

Guided Discovery – Students solve teacher set movement problems with
assistance

Divergent – Students solve problems without assistance from the teacher

Individual – Teacher determines content. Student plans the program.

Learner Initiated – Student plans own program. Teacher is advisor.

Self Teaching – Student takes full responsibility for the learning process.

'The Game is the Greatest Coach'
'Enjoy the Game'

[hockeygod]

Tom,

Thanks for posting the Mosston Spectrum. I have read about it before, but it is a good one to put on here. Hopefully coaches can see where they are at and try to "move to a lower level" – away from COMMAND!

So coaches, when you played, where would you put your coaches' style on this scale? How much of an influence does that have on your style?

For me, I had terrible coaches in midget and junior; they were all Command style (but with limited knowledge, poor communication skills, demonstrating favoritism (thereby losing my respect), and poor role models.) So in hindsight, it was actually good for me to endure this. Although this killed my love to play the game, it made me more determined to 'be a better coach than those dummies I played for' and I started to embrace different styles. Today I flex between styles that are appropriate for the situation and level. I do try to move my players toward becoming independent thinkers… so that is towards the DIVERGENT part of the scale.

Dean
M.Ed (Coaching)
Ch.P.C. (Chartered Professional Coach)
Game Intelligence Training
"Great education depends on great teaching."

[hockeygod]

Concussions – WHL tops NHL in head trauma stakes

ALLAN MAKI
From Tuesday's Globe and Mail
Published Monday, Mar. 21, 2011

Dave Adolph was there the night his son Max was obliterated.

It happened in Portland, Ore., where Max’s Kelowna Rockets were playing the Winterhawks in a Western Hockey League game late last October. Adolph had the puck down low and was trying to protect it when all of a sudden he was rocked high and hard by an opposing player.

At that moment, both father and son were changed. Max Adolph has struggled with post-concussion syndrome all season, and Dave Adolph, a hockey coach by profession, has wrestled with his emotions while trying to help his son.

“It’s terrible,” Dave Adolph said. “He feels useless, worthless. As a parent, you offer support, but it’s frustrating because that’s all you can do. I don’t know how to comfort him.”

For two decades, Adolph has coached the University of Saskatchewan men’s hockey team. Before that, he played for the Huskies and captained their 1983 national championship-winning team. He knows the game, studies it and has followed the recent rash of head injuries, not just because they’re in the news, but because it’s hit home.

His 18-year-old son Max has played just over 30 games this WHL season. The league’s weekly reports show he was out with a head injury on Nov. 2, 2010. He returned to action Dec. 7 but was out again with a head injury on Jan. 11, 2011. He returned Feb. 8, then was sidelined yet again, this time for good, on Feb. 22.

Overall this season, WHL players suffered more concussions and head injuries than their celebrated counterparts in the National Hockey League. By the NHL’s own tally, there have been 80 incidents of players hurt by a shot to the head. According to the WHL’s updates for its 22 teams, there were at least 97 cases of concussions and head-related injuries.

WHL commissioner Ron Robison acknowledged that count, tabulated by the Kamloops Daily News, and agreed: “The number of concussions has risen at an alarming rate.”

Why, though, is the crux of the matter.

Robison sees it as many hockey people do: a batch of ingredients creating a dangerous mix; bigger, stronger players moving on an ice surface that hasn’t gotten any larger. Add to that the clampdown on hooking and holding that has allowed for more speed and more hits. Add, too, a generation of young players cursed by the advent of lighter yet more dangerous equipment. They feel invincible until that same piece of equipment on an opposing player hammers them into submission.

“More than half of the concussions occur next to the glass,” Robison said. “When we discuss it with the coaches and managers, it’s largely players who are positioned along the boards. Maybe we have to look at charging and the way the rules are called.”

The father believes his son’s recurring problems are related to the hit he took in Portland.

“He was in the corner, doing what he does, trying to cycle the puck,” Adolph recalled. “He exposed his head and he got ripped. [This past Saturday] he felt nauseous. He told the Kelowna trainer and that put him on another seven-day rest period. He’s worried if the coach thinks he’s not tough enough. That’s what kids do. As a parent, I’m thankful he’s not playing.”

Adolph’s twin vantage points as a father and coach have altered his way of thinking. He admitted his son’s plight affected the way he acted this past Canadian Interuniversity Sport season. For starters, he paid more attention to what the trainer was saying about the Huskies’ injured players. He also found himself “reaching out to those kids, 24/7. Those were things I never thought of before.”

Adolph has done his share of thinking over what’s happening in hockey. He wonders why modifications haven’t been made to deaden the dangerously hard-shell elbow pads and shoulder pads, something that’s been talked about for close to 10 years. He wonders why so many young hockey players go into the corners with their arms down, their heads exposed, face-first to the glass.

He wonders, too, why every hit now has to be so punishing, as if the intent is to hurt the opponent, especially if he’s in a vulnerable position.

“There’s no more angling [off a puck carrier], especially in junior hockey,” Adolph said. “They’re trying to put someone out of the game. Before, kids would get their sticks up [as protection] and you’d see more high-sticking penalties. Now you see them get crushed and their heads ricochet off the glass.”

Max Adolph recently returned home to Saskatoon to spend time with his parents. They wanted to see how he was doing, how he responded to their prompts. It was a chance for the hockey-coach dad to talk to his son and say the only thing he could.

“I saw him the time he was hit in Portland, that was not good. But at home, he was bright and positive. I wanted to reassure him there’s more to life and that he’ll find something he enjoys doing [beyond hockey]. We wanted to make sure he knows that.”

—–

I coached against Dave at the CIS level – he is a great person – and now that I am also a dad, this article really hit home. With all of the issues surrounding hockey (a lack of respect, head hits / concussions, bullying, abuse, etc.), these really make me think about how I can make the game better? I know I sure try hard to educate kids and show them the 'right' way to play the game (with respect, humility, discipline – learn the principles and techniques behind the game.) I know there are common problems across all sports and some sports have particular problems attached to them… but I still find myself sometimes asking, "Do I want my kids to play hockey or would they be better off doing something else?" Time will tell…
———————————————–
Dean kid's and adults can get hurt doing anything. In the last week alone my wife slipped on the ice and went flying walking behind her car. She got a minor concussion and lots of bruises. Last night my youngest daughter was a passenger and a car that turned right into them on a slippery road and she is going to get checked for a concussion today. Life is dangerous and risky.

We all have to keep working to make the things we all do safer. Keep trying to influence the hockey world to call the penalties in the rule book. Work towards the culture of hockey being safer. Good technique and positive attitudes about others go a long way to making the game safe.

There is self protection as well. This morning one of my kid's caught an edge and fell backwards. He allowed the back of his head to hit the ice. Yesterday in my men's hockey 2 players did the same thing but kept their heads up and protected themselves. It is a combination of a lot of things. When hockey is played within the rules it is a very safe sport. We all have to work on making sure that sportsmanship drives the culture of the game.

Dean
M.Ed (Coaching)
Ch.P.C. (Chartered Professional Coach)
Game Intelligence Training
"Great education depends on great teaching."

[hockeygod]

THN.com Blog: Max Domi situation highlights issues surrounding freedom of young Canadian players

Ken Campbell 2011-03-21

Is Tie Domi’s recent announcement that his talented son, Max, intends to pursue the college hockey route in the United States a genuine intention or an attempt to have him drafted by the Ontario League team of his choice? With the OHL Cup – which is basically the all-Ontario minor midget championship – on the horizon this week, we’ll likely find out soon. But either way, kudos for Domi and his son for doing it.

As reported by Steve Simmons in The Toronto Sun on Sunday, Domi announced his 15-year-old son Max would eschew the OHL in order to play U.S. college hockey and next season he will bide his time in the United States League while he fast-tracks his way through high school in time to be eligible to play college hockey in 2012-13. Aside from being a very talented player, Max Domi is an outstanding student and should have his high school diploma in one year.

But that’s where this all gets very, very murky. First of all, Domi would not be the first player in history to tell all OHL teams he has chosen the college route. Hundreds of players over the years have told the OHL to stay away from them, which, in some cases, is basically code for telling the OHL they want to choose where they play.

And why not? If you’re a talented teenager and OHL owners are going to make money off your back, why not dictate the terms of your sentence? These kids ride buses all over the province, sometimes miss school and get paid less than minimum wage, so why would a talented player with options not use his leverage to his own benefit?

Secondly, Hockey Canada and USA Hockey have an agreement that borders on the obscene when it comes to restricting the rights of young people. Fearful it will lose its best prospects to college hockey, the Canadian League has convinced Hockey Canada to prohibit any 16-year-old Canadian player, in conjunction with USA Hockey, from playing in the USHL unless they appeal to the National Appeals Committee and demonstrate "special circumstances" or move there with a parent. What makes it so obscene is the CHL opens its arms to American-born 16-year-olds and has no problem with doing it, but insists on making it a one-way street.

Sure, it saves the best young players for the Canadian junior system and keeps them away from the clutches of the U.S. college system, largely because the CHL has access to the players at an age when American universities aren’t even allowed to contact them. But where exactly are the best interests of the player being served here? Anyone?

But Domi can, and likely will, get around this rule. The only other way a Canadian player can play in the USHL as a 16-year-old without appealing is for him to take up residence in the United States, either moving there with a parent or by residing with someone who is willing to assume guardianship of him.

Either should be doable for the Domi family. Either he or Max’s mother, Leanne, could move to a USHL city for a year and rent an apartment. That’s precisely what former NHLer Dave Gagner did so his son, current Edmonton Oiler center Sam, could play for the Sioux City Musketeers in 2005-06. Gagner moved his entire business to Minnesota and took up residence so Sam could play in the USHL legally. And if Domi needed to legitimize his move by finding employment in the U.S., there’s little doubt his good friend, Pittsburgh Penguins owner Mario Lemieux, would be able to oblige.

Then again, as we said earlier, all this might simply be posturing to have Domi land in a favorable situation, such as, say, the Kitchener Rangers. There is absolutely no doubt that despite the warning not to take him, an OHL team will draft Max Domi. One might even draft him in the first round, since the OHL now has a little-known rule that stipulates if your first round pick does not report, you get another choice immediately after your first round pick in the following year’s draft.

It all seems rather insidious, doesn’t it? A teenager should have the right to play where he wants.

Dean
M.Ed (Coaching)
Ch.P.C. (Chartered Professional Coach)
Game Intelligence Training
"Great education depends on great teaching."

[Author]

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