The NHL's Brain Problem

Derek Boogaard's death won't be in vain if the league – for once – pays attention to its critics.

The NHL's decision to realign its conferences has been completely – and rightly – overshadowed by news that recently deceased enforcer Derek Boogaard had been suffering from chronic traumatic encephalopathy before his death. CTE is believed to be caused by repeated blows to the head, and as The New York Times' John Branch details in shiver-inducing detail, Derek Boogaard suffered hundreds upon hundreds of fists throughout his minor and professional careers. (An aside: Please, Pulitzer committee, just give every award you can give to Branch for the series. It is truly journalism of the highest order.) The Times' revelations have once again forced the league and its millions of fans to re-examine fighting's role in the game, with some, such as The Globe and Mail's Roy MacGregor, hoping the attention on the issue will finally lead to change:

No longer, however, can this be dismissed as the bleatings of the intellectual softies and snobs of the north who believe hockey should follow all other contact sports and put an end, as much as possible, to head shots and fighting.

The New York Times is a very different voice. It is not only heard, loud and clear, in New York City, where NHL headquarters are found, but it speaks to those advertisers who may be a bit unsure of how much they wish to link themselves corporately to a sport that thinks bare-knuckle fists fights are part of the entertainment package.

Coincidentally (or perhaps not), the Times' series was released just as the NHL's board of governors convened for a week to discuss the league's direction. Unless they are completely tone-deaf, the league's executives will surely realize that staged fighting is only bringing them bad press (and, in all likelihood, dead players). MacGregor suggests the execs ban 'staged fighting' altogether, and introduce much more severe penalties for any fights that do not arise out of the heat of the moment. It's a fine proposal, but one dependent on the league listening to those "intellectual softies and snobs." We're not holding our breath.

The National Post's Joe O'Connor cautions the NHL from overreacting to the Boogaard series so as to preserve that second kind of 'heat of the moment' type of fighting. Fights that erupt out of passion and anger – O'Connor points to the Vincent Lecavalier/Jarome Iginla tilt in the 2004 Stanley Cup Finals as an example – is "hockey expressed in its most raw and pure form. Where the players’ desire to win — and not the millions of dollars the two superstars put in the bank — [is] palpable. Lecavalier and Iginla fought because the game, because winning, meant everything." Sadly, that kind of fight is rare next to the staged fights, in which enforcers such as Boogaard (and other casualties such as Rick Rypien) confer beforehand, agree to a fight, drop the gloves, dance around a bit, and bash each other's brain cells into submission before parading to the penalty box.

That kind of fighting is all that Boogaard could really do on the ice – in his career, he potted a total of three goals in 277 games. "... And that’s the problem, not with fighting per se, but with a league where, somehow, at some hard- to-pinpoint moment in the past, the hockey goon was born," says O'Connor. "The solution is obvious: banish the goon."

The Times' Lynn Zinser takes a look around the American sporting press and notes a disturbing lack of coverage on the Boogaard story, with NHL.com, ESPN, and Yahoo! all running the realignment story with little to no mention of Boogaard's brain. Zinser suggests that this is where the "waiting begins. Waiting to see if the sport reacts to something that has laid out the devastating effects of fighting in painful detail. Waiting to see if fans will continue to cheer fights, knowing they are likely trading those players’ brains for their entertainment. Waiting to see if pundits can still manage to proffer the absurd arguments about the violence preventing more violence."

The single-most damning piece of evidence against fighting was only published this week, and its impact could take a while to take hold among the general population, the hockey-viewing public, and the players, agents, doctors, executives, and more that make up the NHL. After all, this is a league that took the better part of a decade to determine that hits targeting the head ought to be illegal, and only then after such hits ended the careers of Eric Lindros, Paul Kariya, Marc Savard and nearly that of Sidney Crosby. But Branch's piece is a singular work: The same patience and time he put into crafting such a series will almost certainly have to be repaid in kind by the masses calling for an end to fighting.