Concussion thread
 

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/mul...content.1.html

Concussions are a big deal. Sauer seems to have had a nasty one. Is it possible he's done? If Staal gets another one like he did last year, is he done? I said the same thing about Crosby. He missed the last half of last season and 30 games of this year. He comes back and 5 games later he gets a major concussion. It seems like a Lindros-esq situation. Crosby probably will get another major one when he comes back, and judged on last time, it won't take much. It's really sad that these bright careers could come to an end because of this injury.

Thoughts?

it;s a physical sport. sometimes, stuff happens.

Does Sauer have a history of concussions? From what I've read the current belief is that if you allow a player's brain to fully heal before he returns to play that can go a long way in a lasting recovery. Then there are players, perhaps Crosby, who may be susceptible to them again and again. Not sure Sauer is necessarily in the latter camp. He took one hell of a shot that could take quite a while to fully recover from. Hopefully he's 100% and ready to go for training camp next season.

I don't think Crosby was concussed this season. I think he agitated his untreated vertebrae injury further when he fell. His head never made contact with anything.

As for Sauer I can only hope and pray this isn't too serious. He's been out longer than I anticipated unfortunately.


Silly question, then again maybe not. Why doesn't the league put a little bit of padding down on the ledges on the bottom of the glass? Including up on posts that are vertical like the one Max Pacioretty was injured from Chara by.

nothing coulda prevented max pacs injury. That was just vicious man. I think padding might be a good idea on the ledges though.

I was thinking the exact same thing a while back. Why don't they just make the dasher board out of a firm foam like material. Just a bit of sponginess would seem to make quite a bit of a difference from a safety standpoint, no?

And they did put padding on all the exposed vertical stanchions this season.

And back to Crosby. There were times when Lindros got a normal body check and his head didn't hit anything and boom... concussion.

Max was going to get concussed no matter what, but according to the laws of Physics, the padding would have lessened the severity of the concussion. An event like what happened to Pacioretty will happen again. I doubt that the force of it will match that of what Chara did, so maybe in the next instance the next player thrown against that post won't be concussed if it's padded.

Bettman goes on the air on SiriusXM sometimes. I forget what times but I'm going to try and call in and ask him that very question. Would putting padding up change the game in any significant way? No. So why not do it?

It was a clean hit too.

It's not about whether the hit was clean or dirty (debatable, but another topic really). It's about lessening the likelihood of a concussion when it happens again.

I would think a guy getting hit at that exact location the way max pac was would be an injury 100% of the time.

A concussion thread,

Is this limited to Rangers with concussions, the long term medical effects of a concussion, what differentiates a concussion from just a good ol' knock on the head? I feel concused just grasping the enormity of this topic.

Concussions have been around forever, just never received the media attention until recently, which now belongs to Jeremy Linn. Want to get a good sample group together for research, go talk to old boxers, most are still walking around looking for their corner even though they retired 15yrs ago.
However, due to the recent media frenzy, now anytime you fall down and go boom, you have to be cleared by an head injury specialist before returning to life.