A handful of quality NHL players are dealing with injuries to begin training camp, but don't think for a moment these athletes are any less tough than NHLers of decades past, writes Adam Proteau.
If you’re an opinion column writer in today’s hockey world – or any world, for that matter – you always ought to be guarding against the “old man grumpus” syndrome: you know, that mentality that regularly suggests the “old school” way of doing things is much better than present-day school. It’s never easy for any generation of people to acknowledge society is almost always better than generations past, but that’s really the truth of it all.
For instance, in baseball, the art and science of pitching has changed significantly over the past number of decades. Gone are the expectations that starting pitchers should be nine-innings-pitching machines in the form of a Jim Palmer or Gaylord Perry. But that doesn’t mean today’s pitchers are worse in any way than those who preceded them. It’s a case of approaching the sport differently, managing game load and spreading out pitching staff in order to maximize their impact.
Similarly, in hockey, the sport – at least, on the surface – deals with player health much differently than it once did. Not all that long ago, NHLers were expected to play through injury, even if that meant only being able to provide a small percentage of the elite skill that made them so valuable to their teams. In some ways, that remains true today – players who can weather the grind of an 82-game schedule are heralded for their “toughness,” while those with unfortunate luck on the health front over the long term are inevitably moved on from.
Yet, by now, we should be acknowledging the fact that NHLers today are no more or less tough than the players who once roamed hockey’s best rinks. Injuries are an inevitability for NHLers in this day and age, and the injury bug has already chomped into many teams’ rosters early in training camp.
As THN.com’s Carol Schram chronicled in a recent story, stars such as Colorado’s Cale Makar and Chicago’s Taylor Hall weren’t ready to be full participants at the start of training camp. Neither was Sharks captain Logan Couture as well as Panthers defensemen Aaron Ekblad and Brandon Montour, who both are expected to be out of action into December. Meanwhile, Rangers star forward Mika Zibanejad is sidelined day-to-day with an undisclosed upper-body injury, and Canadiens defenseman Chris Wideman is out of action indefinitely after suffering a back injury. And the Blackhawks’ former superstar forward Patrick Kane remains without a new NHL employer because of injury.
All in all, the medical units of each NHL team have their work cut out for them, not because players are more fragile, but rather because, in part, the game has gotten faster, and collisions have become more catastrophic to the human body. Off-season training also has contributed to what at times feels like an injury epidemic, with the ferocity of workouts rising to in-season levels virtually all year long. Bodies can only take so much before they give out on players.
But perhaps the key reason we see so many NHLers in civilian clothes before, during and after games is because each franchise has become more delicate in the way they treat injured athletes. To wit: today’s teams will always choose to sit out players who’ve suffered concussions for much longer than they would once have done. That’s a credit to league doctors and team management. Better to err on the side of caution than ruin a player’s career – and their quality of life during and after their careers have ended – than rush an on-ice asset back to action just to give the player the appearance of a “committed” competitor.
Internally, every team now factors injuries into their model of operation. If you’re a franchise that has the fewest man-games lost in any given year, two things are probably happening: (1) Your team’s training and health support staff are doing a solid job, and (2) You’re on the good end of plain old luck. No workout or game plan can fully prevent injuries from happening, but you can put players in a position where they’ve got the best odds of playing every game on their team’s schedule. (Rachel Doerrie expanded on this topic back in April.)
But luck is what winds up keeping GMs and coaches awake in the wee hours of the morning. Luck can be the difference between missing and making the Stanley Cup playoffs and between a deep playoff run and an early post-season exit. It may drive some fans and media nuts to chalk up an organization’s success to good fortune, but in a league where talent is spread out fairly evenly across all 32 teams, the fine line between winning and losing can often come down to the teams that are healthiest, especially at the right time of the season.
Some teams indeed thrive despite their injured players, but by and large, if you lose a top talent or two for an extended period, all the contributions from players who are healthy won’t be enough to put you in a playoff position by next spring. The best thing fans can do knowing the truth of the matter is hold their breath throughout the first stages of the season and hope durability proves to be an area they ultimately do well in. If there were a method to achieve that goal, all teams would follow it. But the reality is nobody can predict what’s ahead for their team this year.
The name of the game for NHL teams and individuals is “rolling with the punches” and hoping the hockey gods look kindly on you on the health front. And that’s unlikely to change in the months and years to come.