Football concussion study results are bad news for NHL
Boston University researchers recently published their findings in regard to the brains of deceased football players in regards to CTE. They’re still studying the brains of deceased hockey players, and similar results could cost the NHL millions of dollars.
It’s now pretty clear why the NHL has been trying to meddle in the ongoing research at Boston University regarding deceased hockey players’ brains. If the football concussion study results are any indication of how the hockey study results will look, it could end up in the NHL paying out millions of dollars.
Also ongoing right now is a lawsuit brought against the NHL by former players, alleging that the NHL was negligent in informing players of all the risks of working for its business. The suit specifically focuses on the risk of concussions inherent in on-ice fighting between players.
Most recently, the NHL won a small victory with the denial of a plaintiffs’ petition for the court to disallow the testimony of the expert witnesses lined up by the NHL (paywall). If the NHL’s previous deceptive dealings with the federal court in Minnesota processing this dispute are any indication, it’s likely that the NHL’s experts have been hand-selected to cast doubt upon any link between playing hockey and long-term neurological disorders like chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE).
If the findings by the BU researchers regarding the deceased hockey players’ brains mimic what was found in the deceased football players’ brains, whether or not the testimonies of the NHL’s witnesses are allowed may not make much of a difference. It will be firmly established that for hockey players as well as football players, repeated concussions played a role in the formation of CTE.
Given the fact that 110 out of 111 deceased football players’ brains showed signs of CTE, the likelihood that the majority of deceased hockey players’ brains will show similar signs is high. It seems that the repeated head trauma, regardless of how the impacts were delivered, are a primary culprit in the development of CTE.
Counsel for the plaintiffs could present these findings as unbiased, third-party verification of the risks inherent in playing hockey. It would be difficult for the defense, the NHL, to dispute that. From there, the legal path forward gets less clear for the plaintiffs, however.
The burden also lies on the plaintiffs to prove that the NHL was aware of these risks and knowingly withheld that information from the players. That’s going to be a much more difficult task, and currently there isn’t a team of university researchers working to provide that information for the plaintiffs in this case.
If they are successful, however, then the NHL could find themselves in a similar position to where the NFL was within the past five years. The NHL will likely be forced to reach a settlement with the class of players that could similarly reach tens of millions of dollars.
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In the end, the plaintiffs in the NHL concussion case will have to prove to a federal court that the NHL knew that fighting could lead to repeated concussions and chose to conceal that information from the players. If they are successful in that, medical research demonstrating that repeated concussions for hockey players contributed to the development of CTE definitely ups the ante. Given what has already been revealed in the football concussion study, it’s only a matter of time until those stakes are raised.