The Concussion Blog

Each week we (TCB & @nhlconcussions)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.

We last updated you early this month after a very arduous month of December.  Due to the sheer volume and player effected by concussions the All-Star Game will be without many of its “Stars” this year.  I would like to preface this by saying that a lot of the new numbers can be attributed to the better awareness and perhaps the players themselves taking this injury more serious.

That being said we noted via Twitter that last year at this time there were 54 concussions reported/found in the NHL, it is an understatement to say there has been an increase, ROUGHLY A 60% INCREASE.  Hits like this one on Jochen Hecht, are very innocent looking at first glance, but these are the occurring, in my opinion these are more common due to the cumulative effect of subconcussive hits;

The better news is that teams are not “hiding” behind upper body and undisclosed injuries as much as they were last year.  We released a post exposing what we firmly believed to be injuries improperly classified.  This time around thanks to @nhlconcussions (follow him, that is his avatar above), we only have one more to expose, Ryan McDonagh;

The current total sits at 90, last year the entire regular season produced 98, and including the playoffs, 114…

With all the information at hand and the best possible research here is the All-Star Break numbers, we used an average of 50 games played, (indicate previous report stats);

• 0.56 Head/Concussion per Game (0.06)
• 1.80 Head/Concussion per “Game Night” (1.98)
• 13.04% of the original active NHL roster has been affected (11.45)
• Team Breakdown:
  • NYI – 7
  • MIN, PHI, PIT – 6
  • BUF, CAR, COL, OTW – 5
  • BOS, CLB – 4
  • CHI, FLA, NAS, STL, TOR – 3
  • CAL, DAL, DET, EDM, NYR, SJ, TB, VAN, WAS – 2
  • LA, NJ, PHX, WIN – 1
  • ANA, MTL – 0