The Concussion Blog

Each week we scour the web to find concussions in the National Hockey League.  We will keep a running tally on that information as the season progresses.  However, it is not easy as the NHL has decided that listing injuries as “upper body” or “undisclosed” is a good indicator of actual injuries occurred.  Our list is believed to be as accurate as possible, even including injuries that have vague listings but through reports and video analysis should be classified as concussions.  We will also be using “Fink’s Rule” to include concussions in the listing.

The last TCB Concussion Report for the NHL noted a slight decrease of concussions over the same period of time in 2010-2011.  That has completely reversed, due to a very high incidence of concussions in December.  After November there was a 2% decrease of concussions after December and early in January there has been a 39% increase from the previous year.  Of note we did include Sidney Crosby and Mikel Samuelsson.

There can be a myriad of reasons for this, one that we hope is the actual case is: awareness.  Awareness and honesty are a good thing in uncovering the real issue of concussions in all sports.  It seems that the NHL is at least starting to take it serious by labeling all the injuries correctly.  Mind you that we did find some concussions that were veiled in an “upper body” listing.

Another reason is that the game itself may be in need for an adjustment to abate the sudden increase (if in fact it is an increase, just like the NFL this could be a static number, but since we have no foundation to compare it to we can only assume).

Now on to the stats for this month (using 40 games as the average);

• 0.06 Head/Concussion per Game
• 1.98 Head/Concussion per “Game Night”
• 11.45% of the active NHL roster has been affected
• Team Breakdown:
  • NYI – 7
  • COL, MIN, OTW – 5
  • BUF, CLB, PHI – 4
  • BOS, CAR, CHI, FLA, NAS, STL, TOR – 3
  • CAL, DAL, DET, EDM, TB, VAN, WAS – 2
  • LA, NJ, NYR, PHX, SJ – 1
  • ANA, MTL, WIN – 0