Sidney Crosby Return Lives Up To Hype

If the media had things the way the media would probably have wanted it, this wouldn't have played out the way it did.

Some 29 hours before the opening faceoff of Monday's Pittsburgh Penguins-New York Islanders game in Pittsburgh, the Penguins announced that captain/superstar/hockey lightning rod Sidney Crosby would be returning. Crosby was scheduled to play in a game for the first time since early January, when his MVP season was cut short by a concussion that wouldn't go away (presumptuous, maybe, but Sid had 32 goals and 66 points in 41 games, so saying he was on track for the MVP is probably quite the understatement).

Versus scuttled plans to televise Boston-Montreal (boring!). CBC scuttled plans to televise whatever CBC usually televises on Monday nights. They scrambled to get their broadcasters to Pittsburgh for the game, Versus sending Dave Strader and Pierre McGuire, while CBC went with the "A" team of Jim Hughson and Craig Simpson.

No one knew what to expect. Pittsburgh coach Dan Bylsma talked of Sid playing 12 minutes. He was going to play between Pascal Dupuis and Chris Kunitz, his linemates last season. But would he have to kick off the rust, or would he quickly return to his old self?

The answer was quick. And it was as emphatic as it was quick.



It took all of 2:20 of ice time for Sidney Crosby to light the lamp.

Before the game, NHL Network's E.J. Hradek boldly predicted Sid would have three points. I was watching, and I wasn't so sure. After all, he wasn't going to have his normal ice time. He hadn't done anything at game speed since January.

The comeback from concussions eventually turns into a mental game. What would happen when Crosby was on the verge of getting hit. What would happen when he got hit hard? Would he shake it off and keep playing, or would there be doubts and questions about whether or not he was okay?

No worries. He took hits. He gave hits. He kept going, and he kept dazzling the home crowd in Pittsburgh.

It was a great show, even from the couch. Crosby did everything that made him the best player in the world before he was hurt. He has speed unlike virtually anyone else. His vision and smarts are second to none, too. But what makes Crosby great is that competitive drive, and it doesn't look like he's lost one bit of that drive.

From Bruce Arthur of The National Post:

And Crosby, once again, was able to soar to the occasion. A little over five minutes into his second hockey life, on his third shift, Crosby gathered a puck at speed in the neutral zone, raced right around defenceman Andrew MacDonald, and sliced a backhand over the glove hand of rookie goaltender Anders Nilsson. The clock froze at 5:24 and Crosby turned in the corner, flexed his arms, roared “F— yeah!” along with the crowd, turning the air a little blue.

He would add an assist on a Brooks Orpik one-timer that made it 2-0, and would pick up a secondary assist on the power-play goal by Evgeni Malkin that made it 3-0. He would win a puck battle, create space, and send a knuckling backhand that deflected off the leg of Islanders defenceman Steve Staios for the game’s final goal. Four points, and he could have had more — twice he set up teammates who hit the post. He kept displaying his old terrifying speed, his drive, his relentlessness. Like old times.

“The first draw — it’s a faceoff and he battles like it’s the last draw of the season,” said Penguins coach Dan Bylsma.

“I felt like I was waiting forever,” said Crosby, who played just 15:54. “And I kind of was, in a way. I’ll have a great memory of this one for a lot of different reasons.”

Sure, the Islanders looked like a team that was a ladder and a bucket of confetti away from playing the Harlem Globetrotters. But it’s easy to forget that as recently as Sept. 7, Crosby didn’t absolutely rule out the possibility of retirement.

It was an incredible night for the sport, one that brought it plenty of attention it wouldn't normally get.

At the tail-end of November, that's hardly a bad thing.

How Hockey is Evolving

Whether it's the NHL, college hockey, or high school hockey, we're seeing a pretty impressive crackdown on hits to the head in recent years.

Could it be better? Sure. But it's a start.

The game is evolving. While some like Don Cherry might not like it, most realize and understand that this is for the greater good of the sport long-term.

In the NHL, Brendan Shanahan has taken over as the league's head of player safety and supplemental discipline czar. The results so far have been really good. Shanahan has hit the ground running, issuing a number of controversial suspensions during the preseason and early in the regular season. While he might not be "right" in the eyes of the public 100 percent of the time, Shanahan has been open and honest about his decision-making, and willing to make a case for those decisions in the public eye.

He doesn't insult anyone's intelligence. He explains what he is seeing on the tape, and why his Department of Player Safety has decided what it has decided in every case.

Even when he issues a suspension I have disagreed with -- like the two-game ban to Pierre-Marc Bouchard that will wrap up Tuesday in Ottawa -- it's hard to rip him for his line of thinking, because he lays it all out on tape, and he's been consistent with his positions.

Shanahan even opened his office's decision NOT to suspend Tampa Bay's Ryan Malone for a hit on Chris Campoli. Here is that video.



This is a perfectly reasonable argument, and one that can be used going forward to judge future hits and whether players will be suspended.

In the college game, head contact (where the head is targeted) has been a five-minute major and game misconduct or disqualification for a few years now. I'm not a huge fan of how officials have executed those calls, but the rule seems to have been effective in getting players to exercise more responsibility with the contact they make on the ice.

Outside of a questionable hit by Notre Dame's Stephen Johns Saturday night in Duluth, I haven't really seen anything that would qualify as dirty, or that Shanahan would want to address were he college hockey's discipline czar.

(Sidebar: Can you imagine WCHA Director of Officiating Greg Shepherd and/or Commissioner Bruce McLeod making a video to explain a disciplinary decision and then releasing it to the public like Shanahan does? The potential for unintentional comedy is off the charts.)

The bottom line here is that there are things the college game can do to clean itself up even further -- i.e. mandatory time off the ice if there is any head contact (think "quiet room"), or less leeway for officials when calling penalties for hits to the head. But college hockey is doing good things, and the game is evolving in terms of on-ice safety as a result.

At the high school and youth levels, there are movements underway to educate coaches, parents, and kids about the symptoms and dangers of concussions. The more you know, the better off you are, and in the case of concussions, so much is unknown that it's vitally important that people understand the facts and the myths about them.

No matter the level of hockey, we've finally stopped fooling around with head shots and head injuries, and you're seeing players' games evolving as a result. Expect things to keep getting better, as the NHL's crackdown -- and its general effectiveness -- will have a great impact on the rules and regulations at lower levels.

Dany Heatley Channels His Inner Badger With Elbow on Steve Ott

Former Wisconsin Badger Dany Heatley hasn't been known for dirty play in his NHL career. He's more the "goal-scoring" and "lazy skating" guy.

Tuesday night, Heatley decided to add "cheap elbow thrower" to his repertoire, using Dallas' Steve Ott as a target.



The NHL Wheel of Justice says Heatley will receiver a "paltry fine" for his hit, as you have to take into account Heatley's status as a superstar.

In all reality, Heatley should be suspended. But he probably won't be, because the NHL has a history of unpredictability (read: stupidity) on this subject.

Jesse Martin Hit Violently, Improving

If you didn't hear about this over the weekend, or get a chance to watch it happen, University of Denver senior forward Jesse Martin was the victim of the first violent and controversial hit of the 2010-11 WCHA season.

This one -- like the one by Aaron Marvin on Chay Genoway last year -- could be season-ending. Worse yet, the words "career" and "threatening" have been thrown out on this one, too.

Martin was skating up the boards Saturday in Grand Forks when he was met by a charging North Dakota forward Brad Malone.

The seniors' bodies hit each other hard, and because Martin put his head down as he struggled to control the puck, the result was scary. Here's a look at the video, with a couple replays thrown in.



First off, some good news and bad news on Martin, who has been declared out for the year by DU.

University of Denver senior center Jesse Martin (Edmonton, Alberta) is in stable condition at the Hennepin County Medical Center in Minneapolis, Minn., tonight after suffering a season-ending injury in last night's 3-0 win over the University of North Dakota.

Martin suffered the injury at the 11:06 mark of the second period after an on-ice collision with North Dakota's Brad Malone, who was assessed a five-minute major penalty for charging and 10-minute game misconduct on the play.

Martin was taken off the ice on a stretcher and was immediately taken to nearby Altru Hospital in Grand Forks, N.D., for observation. After tests were conducted at the hospital, it was determined that Martin needed to be air-lifted to Hennepin County Medical Center for further testing and possible surgery.

According to University of Denver Associate Director of Sports Medicine Aaron Leu, Martin suffered three fractures to his C-2 vertebrae in his neck and is in stable condition. Martin has feeling in his all of his extremities and will undergo further testing during the next 24 hours to determine if surgery is required.

Malone wasn't initially penalized, but the obvious seriousness of the injury to Martin may have played a role in the officials deciding to assess a five-minute major on Malone for charging and a game misconduct.

Now, the WCHA has a difficult decision to make. They were very late to join the rest of the world in taking a stand on headshots last year. When they finally did, fans ripped the league for making an unfair example of St. Cloud State forward Aaron Marvin.

Reality is that if Marvin had been in Brad Malone's skates on Saturday night, the league would be looking at a suspension in the area of five to eight games. Marvin's got to be considered a repeat offender at this point, and he's going to pay a heavy price if he does anything the league doesn't like.

So what does the league think they have to do to Brad Malone?

This is an illegal hit. It might not have been in 1980, but it is now. Players are bigger. They're faster. They're stronger. There is a school of thought that shoulder pads are designed now in a way that makes players more prone to damage when they get a shoulder hit from someone.

Malone charged Martin. He hit him in the head. He caused a serious and season-ending injury. The player did not see the hit coming and had no way to protect himself. Malone was clearly not making any effort to play the puck -- look where his stick is for the whole time that he's in the shot. While he appeared to be coasting, reality is that he skated down the boards for as far as we could see with no intention of playing the puck, and instead the intent to hit Martin hard.

(I don't think the stick caused any damage, nor do I think Malone wanted to use his stick as a weapon. But the reality is that you have to look at this hit differently because Malone had zero intention of playing the puck. If he did, he had his stick in a really weird position.)

No matter what, the bottom line is that players are more vulnerable to serious injury from big hits than they used to be. The human body is only capable of taking so much.

The "keep your head up" excuse is old and tired. It does not excuse illegal hits. Could Martin have avoided the brunt of the hit if he knew it was coming? Probably. But players are still responsible for the hits they throw.

Hockey is a violent, tough, physical sport. But as player safety becomes more and more important, it's up to the players and fans to adjust. Players have to adjust their style of play, and fans have to adjust the expectations they have for hard, fast, and violent contact.

The clean hits of 20 and 30 years ago won't work in this day and age. Those who can understand that and make the necessary changes to their style of play will be the ones who last the longest in the sport.

We wish nothing but the best to Jesse Martin, too. Martin is a class act who has represented one of the classiest programs in college hockey very well over his three-plus years. Hopefully, his recovery is a success, and if he can't get back on the ice in a competitive environment as a result of this injury, here's hoping he can find a way to stay involved in this great sport.

Why Head Contact is an Issue

Much has been made of sports leagues trying to remove hits to the head from their respective games in recent years.

Many old-school fans are perplexed by the movement. After all, all these guys who played back in the day had less protection on their heads, and yet we didn't hear horror stories about brain damage and the like.

Of course, those fans don't get it. We didn't hear the stories because we didn't know there was any correlation. Doctors didn't know that football could cause so many health problems after the fact.

The case of Mike Webster started people down this path, and others have sadly followed.

(Most notably, pro wrestler Chris Benoit killed his wife and son, then took his own life, but was found to be extremely disturbed.)

Last December, the Bengals lost wide receiver Chris Henry in a tragic accident involving his fiance and a domestic dispute turned really bad. After his passing, his mother gave the Brain Injury Research Institute permission to examine Henry. The results were telling.

Chris Henry, the Cincinnati Bengals wide receiver who died in a traffic accident last year, had chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) -- a form of degenerative brain damage caused by multiple hits to the head -- at the time of his death, according to scientists at the Brain Injury Research Institute, a research center affiliated with West Virginia University.

"We would have been very happy if the results had been negative, but multiple areas of Chris Henry's brain showed CTE," said Julian Bailes, Director of BIRI and chairman of neurosurgery at West Virginia. Bailes and his colleagues plan to present results of their forensic examination at a news conference Monday afternoon.

Researchers have now discovered CTE in the brains of more than 50 deceased former athletes, including more than a dozen NFL and college players, pro wrestler Chris Benoit and NHL player Reggie Fleming.

Repeated blows to the head are the only known cause of CTE, researchers say. Concussive hits can trigger a buildup of toxic tau protein within the brain, which in turn can create damaging tangles and threads in the neural fibers that connect brain tissue. Victims can lose control of their impulses, suffer depression and memory loss, and ultimately develop dementia.

While the links between CTE and behavior are still being studied, many of the former athletes diagnosed with this form of brain damage died under unusual circumstances. Ex-Steeler Justin Strzelczyk, for example, was killed in 2004 after experiencing hallucinations, leading police on a high-speed chase for 40 miles before driving his car into a tanker truck. In 2007, Benoit strangled his wife and 7-year-old son, then put Bibles next to their bodies and hanged himself. Tom McHale, a guard for three NFL teams remembered by teammates as smart and dependable, sank into depression and died of a multiple-drug overdose in 2008.

As PFT notes, we don't know when or how Henry suffered that damage. As Dr. Bailes said, this injury has been observed in longtime NFL players, but not in younger guys like Henry.

But that uncertainty is part of why sports leagues are under so much pressure. Until more is known about these injuries and how they can be prevented, the best way to keep them from happening is to tightly legislate contact to the head as much as humanly possible. It might not be ideal for some fans, but the health and well-being of thousands of athletes in all facets of sports and entertainment is on the line.

Reality is that players are bigger, faster, stronger, and more well-coached than they ever were before. The games are different, with big hits a big part of marketing, along with fixtures on shows like SportsCenter, which often are unfairly blamed for how sports have changed. We have to find a way to balance the thirst fans have for contact with the need to keep players safe so they can live long, productive lives.

Doctors will keep working on trying to figure out the human brain, but they have a long way to go.

In the realm of player safety, so does virtually everybody. Fans need to be patient while the work is done.