So it is Stanley cup time again. I have fortunately moved away from the neighborhood pub I lived near during last playoff time, so I am a little less aware of what is going on; I don't have to compete with all the pub-goers for parking, and I don't hear everyone cheering when the Penguins score.
However, there is a story this time that has really caught my attention: the suspension of Tom Wilson.
First, let me say I really don't know a lot about hockey. I am not going to get into whether he should have been tossed out for the whole series or not suspended at all according to hockey's current rules. I don't know a lot about precedent or what makes something "unavoidable" from a hockey player perspective. However, I do know a little something about physics and brains, so I am going to comment on those aspects of the situation.
First for the physics. There has been a lot of debate about where Tom Wilson hit Zach Aston-Reese first, shoulder or head, but the fact is according to the hockey rules, it doesn't seem to matter. From my understanding, we are trying to determine the main point of contact, not the first point of contact. I have seen videos from lots of angles and I don't know if I can tell a lot from them about the main point of contact, but I can tell you that according to physics, if someone gets hit hard enough to break their jaw badly enough to require surgery and give them a concussion, but their shoulder is more or less okay, they mainly got hit in the jaw, not their shoulder. I can't figure out how someone thinks a guy's jaw was broken by someone hitting mostly his shoulder; that direction of defense for Tom Wilson is pretty flimsy.
As for the brain; concussions are not something to mess around with. There is really no such thing as a little concussion. Medically, concussions are called TBIs, short for Traumatic Brain Injury; when you hit your head hard enough that your brain has bounced around in your skull, your brain has suffered something traumatic. We don't know everything about what TBIs do to people, but our understanding is growing and from what we do know, it really ain't good. The effects are immediate, but they are also lasting. While people often improve in the short term, each incident increases chances for problems with brain function later in life. Furthermore, concussions are not the only kind of TBIs (in fact, they are considered "minor" traumatic brain injuries, which sounds a bit like an oxymoron to me), and it would be a mistake to assume that all the "concussions" these hockey players are getting are merely a concussion; some of them are certainly more severe TBIs. Furthermore, the more concussions you get, the worse it gets, especially if there has not been sufficient time to heal. It is also completely possible to die almost instantly from hits to the head. All of this together, it is quite possible that if Aston-Reese had been hit just a little differently or had taken a hard hit a few minutes before and suffered an un-diagnosed concussion from that hit, he would have never gotten up or he would have died shortly after in the locker room.
But its hockey, right? That is just the nature of the sport. It is dangerous, but they know that and they get paid a lot to do it. Well, there is something to that argument. I definitely think it is ridiculous how much money we give people to do nothing more productive than play a game and these players have spent enough time playing the game to know they are going to get hurt. But just because someone is willing to do something for money doesn't make it ethical to pay them to do it, nor does the players' willingness erase the responsibility those asking them to play have to try to keep the players safe.
And yes, there are a lot of dangerous jobs out there. However, I would submit that not all other industries with high incidents of accidents are operating in a ethical way either, they just are not the subject of this post. But there is also a key difference between hockey and something like logging (which is the most dangerous job in the country and honestly needs some reform too); one is to entertain people, something societies really only get to dedicate money to when other needs are met, and the other is for the building of shelters and such, a pretty critical need for survival. In other words, the cost-benefit ratios are not even in the same realm of discussion, and there really isn't much point in comparing them. When we pay to go to a hockey game, we are paying someone to do something that, especially with current rules, is likely to result in injuries that will effect the rest of their life because we like to watch people bash each other around for fun. I feel like we may take that a little too lightly.
So, I don't know if Tom Wilson was intentionally trying to hit Aston-Reese in the head and break his jaw (though I have to say laughing on the bench when someone you hit is still laying on the ice doesn't speak well of your character, and, no, it doesn't matter what he was laughing about because even if he was laughing about something else, his attention should have been on the status of the guy he just flattened because that is usual human decency. Honestly, the laughter made me more concerned about Wilson's behavior than the hit itself). I don't know if Wilson could have avoided it. I don't know if suspending him for 3 games is fair given current rules and precedent. What I do know is that it shouldn't really matter what he was trying to do. Something needs to be done to protect people and the way this guy plays hockey seems to hurt people a lot. Thus, the way this guy plays hockey should not be legal.
I have a 5 year old son who is very rambunctious and not very aware of his surroundings sometimes. He has on many occasions hit people in the head and flattened his siblings by running through them, much like Wilson seems to (my son doesn't do it nearly as hard as Wilson and isn't usually trying to make contact with people, but you get the idea). My son isn't a mean kid and I don't think he is doing this stuff on purpose, but his response to these incidents is often "he was standing where I was running!" or "I didn't do it on purpose!" Suffice to say, that is not the end of my discussion with him because it doesn't matter whether you intended to hurt someone, someone did get hurt and behavior should change to avoid it in the future. Maybe I am completely off base, but I feel like most people would feel the need to stress these things to a 5 year old like my son, which is why it kind of baffles me that there is resistance to the same kinds of discussions when it comes to the NHL. Are we seriously holding 5-year-old children to higher standards than grown adults playing a silly game?
And really, the people who are arguing that changing rules to reduce these kinds of injuries it awful don't really have any better logic than my 5 year old. His general thinking is that he wants to do something and his sister getting knocked over was just a natural consequence of the activities that he feels must take place for his enjoyment--which is essentially what hockey people are saying about Aston-Reese's broken jaw when they say changing the rules to avoid the kind of hits that produce these kinds of injuries would be watering down the game too much.
So what do I think should happen? Well, it would be great if society in general would realize that getting entertainment from people getting bashed around in ways that lead to lasting effects is kind of a despicable way to be and if hockey players would just decide they were not going to behave that way anymore, but we all know that isn't likely to happen. So I feel like as a society we need to reevaluate the ethics of entertainment at the expense of others, regardless of how willing a participant those others are. For hockey, I think hits to the head should be illegal, regardless of intent. Certainly there will be instances where someone gets penalized for something they didn't mean to do, but there are consequences for accidents and mistakes in other aspects of our lives as well. Hockey players should be responsible for playing the game in a way that doesn't seriously injure others, and if they won't play that way, we should refuse to pay them to play. Instead of saying we pay them millions to accept the risk of dying as part of the sport, we should pay them to accept the responsibility of avoiding killing--or seriously injuring--people as part of the sport. I really wouldn't mind saying that if you injure a player, you will be out for as long as they are--if you end a career, you end your own as well. Because yes, accidents do happen, but as human beings, we have a responsibility to do everything in our power to keep others from getting injured as a result of our actions.
Perhaps this will water down hockey too much and it will no longer be enjoyable, but if that is the case, perhaps we should consider if hockey is a rather barbaric form of entertainment and it would be best to put it to rest anyway.
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