The Commissioner's Comments

 

In 2016, Gary Bettman, the commissioner of the NHL, denied that CTE was caused by concussions when responding to a series of inquiries by Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut. Bettman said, “The relationship between concussions and the asserted clinical symptoms of C.T.E. remains unknown.”

 

Bettman doubled down, saying, “Ultimately, the most concerning aspect of the current public dialogue about concussions in professional sports (as well as youth sports) is the implicit premise that hundreds of thousands — if not millions — of individuals who have participated in contact sports at the high school, collegiate and/or professional levels are not only at a high level of risk for, but actually more than likely to develop, a degenerative, irreversible brain disease (i.e., C.T.E.), and that they should be informed as such.”

 

In 2018, Bettman continued his insistent denial that there was any link between CTE and ice hockey in an interview with WFAN Sports Radio. When pressed to respond to the study conducted by Boston University’s CTE Center, Bettman said, “Boston [University], they will tell you that as it relates to hockey, they don't have enough evidence to reach any conclusions, and they have told me that directly."

 

That claim was quickly refuted by Dr. Ann McKee, a neurologist with BU’s CTE Center, and Chris Nowinski, the chief executive of the Concussion Legacy Foundation in a response obtained by several sports media outlets, such as TSN: “... it is misleading for Mr. Bettman to say we haven’t reached any conclusions. The evidence clearly supports that CTE is associated with ice hockey play. Since that 2012 meeting with Mr. Bettman, the VA-BU-CLF [Veterans Affairs-Boston University-Concussion Legacy Foundation] research team has identified CTE in more ice hockey players, including four amateur hockey players, not all of whom had significant fighting exposure.”

 

It appears that Bettman's denial has not necessarily had a widespread effect on the hockey playing community. Mitchell Denhartog says that the hockey community acknowledges that Bettman's comments are likely in the best interests of the team and the team owners, not in the best interests of the players. He also believes that the hockey community understands the existence of the problem in spite of Bettman's efforts to deny it. 

 

I recently conducted a survey that gathered more than 200 responses from hockey players and fans on Twitter, Facebook and Reddit. In this survey, respondents with collegiate and/or semi-professional ice hockey experience were asked to communicate their perspective on the connection between the sport and CTE. The results indicated that the majority of the respondents that identified as collegiate or semi-professional hockey players saw CTE as a serious problem facing the game. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bert Lenz, the director of Sports Medicine for Olympic Sports at Boston College, compared the prevalence of neurotraumatic events in hockey to those of football.

 

“I don’t know how repetitive the head trauma is because nothing is coming from a set position like in football. ... I don’t know what the rate is; there’s not a lot of action in football, but there’s a lot of resetting of plays. So, that piece for football becomes repetitive trauma based on everything starts again in the exact same position.

 

“Hockey definitely has a face-off play, but there isn’t the linemen coming off the line, there isn’t a scrum like in rugby, it’s a different reset. When there’s a stoppage of play, you win or you lose the face-off and everyone starts moving. It’s not as repetitive and predictable, I think, as football becomes.”