More Moose Jaw and the Crushed Can rink... Carns did play-by-play and wrote newspaper stories / did the radio interviews with us "back in the day!"

Carns and the Crushed Can

Gregg Drinnan Blog - Kamloops Daily News March 10 2011


Some of my best WHL memories are from the Crushed Can. And some of them involve Rob Carnie, a friend from days of yore who once was the radio voice of the Moose Jaw Warriors on CHAB. He now is a 'Featured Personality' on CHAB and is the host of the 800 CHAB Morning Show and The Heartland at Noon.

This being today’s hockey world, his nickname was, uhh, Carns. Unless you were the late Bill Hicke, then a co-owner, GM and sometimes coach of the Regina Pats. To Hicke, Carnie was Brother Love. Might have had something to do with the white suits.

Anyway . . . I got a message from Carns on Wednesday that included something he had written on his Crushed Can memories.

This, hockey fans, is what the Crushed Can and memories are all about . . .

“I started attending hockey games and playing hockey at the MJCC in the fall of '74 when the Carnie family moved to Moose Jaw from Regina. I played in ‘Learn to Play’ for a season and among the other boys was my childhood friend Greg Thatcher. I remember his father Colin ‘coaching’ us while smoking a cigar and telling me I would never be able to take a backhander with a ‘damn curve on the blade of your stick." Why the hell do I remember that?

“I CLEARLY remember my next season . . . in the Church Minor Hockey Association with the St. Joseph Seals, my first ‘real’ team! We practised every Monday morning at 7 in one COLD Civic Centre. We won the championship that season.

“I remember everything was painted orange and blue, including the ice cleaning machine which was an old Willy's Jeep with the ice cleaning apparatus welded on. It even had a name . . . The Connor's Pup. I have no idea why it had a name.

“I remember an old gentleman named Sid who took tickets. He was always smiling and always well-dressed.

“I remember the Regina Silver Foxes coming into Moose Jaw to play the Canucks and my sister's boyfriend, Dave Desautels, who wore No. 10 for the Foxes, blowing out a knee in front of my eyes. He taught me to skate.

“I remember the Japanese national team playing at the Civic Centre and a young man named Doug Smail dominating for the home side in a 4-2 victory. The place was packed.

“I remember what a wonderful player Chris Chelios was as a boy . . . he played two seasons in Moose Jaw.

“I remember hundreds of people smoking while watching the games . . . cigarettes, cigars and pipes . . . and the blue haze that hung over the ice after each Canucks game.

“I saw every home game in a five-year stretch where the Moose Jaw Canucks went to the SJHL championship final versus the Prince Albert Raiders every season. We lost every time. I remember a full-scale brawl in the pregame warmup of one of those games. There were sticks and gloves and helmets, blood and hair all over the ice. There were no penalties.

“I remember the Warriors moving here from Winnipeg. I thought we should have called them the Canucks.

“I remember Graham James. Shame.

“I remember stepping into the broadcast booth as a cocky 21-year-old to assist Bryn Griffiths, then the voice of the Warriors, and thinking I was ‘The Goods!’

“I remember some wonderful young men wearing Warriors jerseys and some wonderful young hockey players. No one was more dynamic and entertaining than Theoren Fleury. No one.

“I remember the adrenaline flowing through my body minutes before ‘Showtime’ on 800 CHAB. I loved that. I used to live for it.

“I remember my old Dad walking up the steep stairs before Warriors games and looking up at me in the broadcast booth and grinning. He was proud of me. He never told me that. I just knew it. I loved him more than I can describe. I miss him.

“And . . . I'll miss the Civic Centre!”

As NHL GMs prepare to convene in Florida, there's no question what issue will top their agenda.

TSN Mark Spector March 11, 2011


CLEARWATER, FLA — A year ago, on the Sunday before the annual National Hockey League general managers’ meetings, Matt Cooke must have decided the agenda was not to his liking.

It was on Sunday March 7, 2010, when his hit on Marc Savard set the GMs’ mandate, and over the next three days in Boca Raton, Rule 48 was born.

"You have to be conscious of trends, and there was a trend," said Vancouver GM Mike Gillis. "We saw those (back pressure) hits that were resulting in devastating injuries — and they were addressed. Now, that rule is still being worked on. Now we’re seeing a different kind of hit."

They will reconvene on Monday through Wednesday in the same Florida coastal town, and the primary goal hasn’t changed: They’ll remain focused on what the Official NHL Rulebook calls: "Rule 48 — Illegal Check to the Head."

Stand down, anti-fighting lobby. The recent call for eliminating fighting from the NHL is not specifically on the agenda.

"I have not heard anyone suggest that it’s going to be a topic," said Toronto Maple Leafs GM Brian Burke. "I assume it will come up … but I certainly do not detect any appetite for the elimination of fighting."

NHL vice president Colin Campbell agreed.

"Anything that is part of the landscape of concussion or hard hits, we will discuss," he said.

Campbell would not divulge the three-day agenda, but he also indicated that the elimination of fighting is not on the National Hockey League’s front burner.

Campbell, who deferred to Mike Murphy on the Zdeno Chara ruling following the hit on Montreal’s Max Pacioretty because Campbell’s son Gregory is Chara’s Boston teammate, also said the recent furor over the Pacioretty incident simply focuses the GMs down a path they have already been travelling.

"Doesn’t change it at all. Not one iota," Campbell said of the furor over the Pacioretty-Chara incident. "It only highlights that people are looking for the NHL to do something (further on head shots). It’s incumbent on us to do something, but not in haste."

Added Gillis: "I do know there is clearly a public outcry. We’ll field that in discussion."

And so on Monday the GMs will view a league presentation chronicling perhaps hundreds of different hits that have resulted in concussions going back through the decades.

Then the GMs will traditionally break into smaller groups charged with examining the different elements of the game that have resulted in concussions.

Rule 48 contains language that states, "A lateral or blind side hit to an opponent where the head is targeted and/or the principle point of contact is not permitted."

This time around, Burke sees three ways the GMs may extend the reach of Rule 48.

"One is status quo, where there is a feeling the rule is working. That some amount of contact has to be permitted," Burke began. "We don’t want this league to be like the OHL or college, where an otherwise clean check that results in contact with the head is penalized."

The second option could be to devise a minor penalty to be called any time the head is contacted during a check. Option No. 3 would be to retain the same standards, but direct Campbell towards protracted suspensions.

"Push for longer, stiffer suspensions. Ask Collie to do more enhanced review," Burke said. "The issue is the role of hitting in our game. We need (north-south, legal hits) in our game. In the OHL that’s a penalty if the head is contacted. We’ve got to keep that hit in our game."

As concussions rise however, the pressure mounts for the NHL to find a solution. And it’s not just coming from inside the game. It is fans, politicians, sponsors — everyone.

That causes Burke and his colleagues to look inward. These guys consider themselves the protectors of the game’s integrity, a role they take very seriously.

"Let’s start with the basic premise that we’re going to have head injuries," Burke said. "The notion that we’re going to get to zero concussions, that’s just ridiculous. You take physical contact out, and people just aren’t interested in watching it."

The GMs will also discuss different overtime formats once again, perhaps moving from 4-on-4 to 3-on-3 at some point in the extra period.

Though Burke admitted his issue with the limited number of post-deadline call-ups will have little traction, he’ll pitch his "bear hug" rule, which would allow a defenceman to wrap his arms around a forward as a protective measure.

We’re doubtful that will fly.

He’ll also re-pitch his "hybrid" icing scheme, which would see the whistle blown if the defensive player is winning the race for the puck at the hashmarks, but allow the race to go the distance if the offensive player is tied or in the lead.

"They use it in the USHL," Burke said. "It eliminates the risk, but saves the race."

March 11, 2011
Ken Dryden on hockey violence: How could we be so stupid?
By KEN DRYDEN
From Saturday's Globe and Mail
The former NHL goalie recalls when helmets and goalie masks were optional. A generation from now, he writes, today's attitude toward hockey violence will seem equally stupid

The brain weighs about three pounds. It floats inside a boney skull, surrounded by spinal fluid, not quite in contact with the skull. Except when the head is jarred.

Then, the brain moves, ricocheting back and forth, colliding with the sides of the skull, like a superball in a squash court. With hard-enough contact, the brain bleeds. And the parts inside it - the neurons and pathways that we use to think, learn and remember - get damaged.

Why would we ever have thought otherwise?

Why would we ever have believed that when the dizziness goes away, everything goes back as it had been before? All the little hits, scores of them in every game, so inconsequential that we don't even know they've occurred - how could we not have known? How could we be so stupid?

I feel the same when I remember that the effects of smoking or of drunk driving were ignored for so long. I feel it when I think of women in the past having no right to vote and few rights of any kind, and when I think about slavery: How could people 50, 100 or 200 years ago not have known? How could they be so stupid?

I wonder what will make people say that about us 50 years from now. What are the big things we might be getting really wrong? Chemicals in our foods? Genetic modifications gone wrong? Climate change?

In sports, I think, the haunting question will be about head injuries. It wasn't until 1943 in the National Football League that helmets became mandatory; in the National Hockey League, not until 36 years after that, in 1979. The first goalie mask wasn't worn in the NHL until 1959.

And in a whole childhood and adolescence of playing goalie, I didn't wear a mask until 1965, when I had to wear one on my college team. How could I have been so stupid?

Smash, crash, bang, maim

A football wide receiver, 220 pounds, cuts across the middle of the field at 35 kilometres an hour; a linebacker, 240 pounds, cuts the other way at 20 km/hour. The wide receiver focuses on the ball; the linebacker focuses on the wide receiver, knowing that a good hit now won't just break up the pass but will break down the focus and will of that wide receiver for each succeeding pass in the game.

Two hockey players, almost as big as the football players, but going even faster, colliding with each other and with the boards, glass and ice exaggerating the force of every hit.

Boxers, snapping jabs and hooks at each other's head, round after round. (But no hitting below the belt; that's not fair.) Ultimate Fighting: Fist, foot, elbow, knee, bone against bone - get your opponent down, get him defenceless and pound away.

In addition, there are the countless mini-collisions that never make the "Highlights of the Night." They make players feel a little dizzy, but then seconds later, almost every time, they feel fine. So they must be fine.

Years later, they may not be thinking so clearly or remembering so well, at a slightly younger age than other people, perhaps. But in the randomness of everything else in life, who's to know why? It could be genes or bad luck. Hockey player Reggie Fleming, known as "Cement Head"; football players Mike Webster, Owen Thomas or Mike McCoy; wrestler Chris Benoit ...

A few weeks ago, I read about the suicide of Dave Duerson, a former all-pro safety with the Chicago Bears. He was 50. In recent years, Mr. Duerson had worked with the NFL players' union, dealing with retired players and their physical ailments, head injuries among them, and reading their doctors' reports. He had begun to have trouble himself remembering names and putting words together. Then, one day he shot himself, not in the head but the chest, so as to preserve his brain intact for future examination, bequeathing it to the NFL's brain bank.

On the same day, in the same newspapers, there was another story about Ollie Matson, an all-pro running back in the 1950s and 1960s for several NFL teams. He was 80 when he died, and for the last several years of his life he had been suffering from dementia; over the last four years, he hadn't spoken. Mr. Matson's death and dementia, it seemed, had to do with the consequences of old age. No connection was made to football or Dave Duerson.

A few days earlier, there had been a story about the death of Bobby Kuntz. He had been one of my favourite players as a kid. During the late 1950s and 1960s, he played for the Toronto Argonauts and Hamilton Tiger-Cats, playing "both ways" as players of the time did - a running back on offence and a linebacker on defence.

He was small for the positions he played, and especially small for the way he played them. He'd put his head down and throw himself into the line or into the bodies of ball carriers, the sound of his collisions sharper and more resounding than any others - the kind that, as a fan, made you go "oooh" and laugh. He was fearless. In playground games, I used to pretend I was Bobby Kuntz, head down, fearless in my own mind.

Mr. Kuntz died at 79, having suffered from dementia the last 11 years of his life. The Kuntz family agreed to have his brain donated to a study of athletes and head injuries, the article said.

The myth of the 'nature of the game'

What is our answer to those voices 50 years into the future? We can only say that we didn't want to know. We thought - we hoped - there wasn't a problem, because if there were, something would need to be done, and we didn't want to do it.

To do something would change the nature of the game. It may be all right, or inevitable, for everything in the world around the game to change; but the game itself is "pure" and must remain that way.

Hockey began in Montreal in 1875 because some rugby players wanted a game for the wintertime, and they wanted to hit each other. But the rugby players couldn't skate very fast, their bodies were smaller than ours are today, and they were playing on a smaller ice surface where they had little room to pick up momentum. With no substitutions allowed, the game moved at coasting speed.

Bigger ice surfaces changed the nature of the game; so did the forward pass; so did boards and glass; so did substitutions, shorter shifts and bigger bodies. Helmeted players in today's game are far more vulnerable to serious head injury than helmet-less players were in generations ago.

We choose to ignore the fact that the "nature" of any game is always changing. Today's hockey - in terms of speed, skill, style of play and force of impact - is almost unrecognizable from hockey 50 years ago, let alone 100. Likewise, helmets, facemasks, 300-plus-pound players and off-field, year-round training have transformed football.

These and other sports changed because someone thought of new ways to do things, others followed and nobody stopped them. In many cases, sports have had to change for reasons of safety or economics. For the sake of the players and fans and the game itself, these sports will and do need to change again.

A few days ago, I read the story of Bob Probert. He was a "goon" whose ability to fight got him into the NHL, and gave him the extra years and playing time he needed to learn how to play an all-around game. It has been calculated that Mr. Probert was in 240 NHL fights - few of which he lost - and countless more in his minor hockey years. Before he died last year, his wife reported, he had been forgetting things and frequently losing his temper. In a post-mortem examination, Boston University's School of Medicine recently reported, Mr. Probert was found to have chronic-traumatic-encephalopathy cells in his brain. He was 45.

The voices of the future will not be kind to us about how we understood and dealt with head injuries in sports. They will ask: How is it possible we didn't know, or chose not to know?

For players or former players, owners, managers, coaches, doctors and team doctors, league executives, lawyers, agents, the media, players' wives, partners and families, it's no longer possible not to know and not to be afraid, unless we willfully close our eyes.

Max Pacioretty was only the latest; he will not be the last. Arguments and explanations don't matter any more. The NHL has to risk the big steps that are needed: If some of them prove wrong, they'll still be far less wrong than what we have now.

It is time to stop being stupid.

Ken Dryden is a former NHL goaltender, and is a lawyer, author and member of Parliament.

Dave,

The Trail Smoke Eaters have the best name and (old) logo in the business! The original one with the smoke coming out of the stacks has been made politically correct when their junior team entered the BCHL many years ago - no smoke now... gotta respect nature and the Green Party crowd!! See the old logo here:

http://icehockey.wikia.com/wiki/1938-39_Trail_Smoke_Eaters

I have met several of the players (and their offspring) from the 1961 team. I know one of the old equipment managers and he gave me a replica jersey (with smoke!) of the 1939 team several years ago. Their is an awesome museum in the Cominco rink that has a lot of sports memorabilia from Trail and the local area. Trail also has a pretty good history and passion for minor baseball - I believe a few of their teams have represented Canada and attended the Little League World Series.

I played some junior in the Kootenay's in the 80's; then I coached in Cranbrook and Invermere (east Kootenay's) in the early 90's and was head coach of a couple of BC U17 teams (Brad Larsen was my Captain one year and Shawn Horcoff another year.) I love the old rinks - Trail and Kimberley were my favourites!

My uncle's playing days in the Kootenay's preceded me; he played against many of these guys as they wrapped up their careers in Senior hockey (Allan Cup) in the late 60's / early 70's. My uncle played one year in Nelson for the Leafs and many years for the Spokane Jets / Flyers. I attended many games as a kid in the old "Boone Street Barn" in Spokane and was amazed by the level of skill and brutality! Senior hockey used to be an amazing spectacle... sad that it has been diminished since the early 80's.

The Usual Suspects
Milbury gets upper hand in violence debate

BRUCE DOWBIGGIN
From Monday's Globe and Mail
Published Sunday, Mar. 13, 2011


Has Mike Milbury surpassed Don Cherry as the go-to guy on Hockey Night in Canada? In light of the Zdeno Chara incident last week (and Milbury’s turn on fighting), anticipation was high Saturday to hear from both Hockey Night personalities over Chara’s devastating hit on Montreal Canadiens forward Max Pacioretty – the closest, some feel, we’ve come to a fatality in an NHL game since Bill Masterton died following a 1968 contest.

While neither Cherry nor the former New York Islanders general manager exactly seized the moment, Milbury nudged ahead on all scorecards with a lucid agenda for the sport’s GMs and owners to deal with criticism from the Canadian Prime Minister, corporate heads and players over the game’s overall safety. Given several days to find a new angle, Cherry simply regurgitated talking points heard throughout the week from others.

Cherry first buried the lead with some predictable fawning on Toronto Maple Leafs goalie James Reimer. When he finally got to the Chara story, Cherry trotted out his usual grab bag of ad hominem attacks. Air Canada, being based in Montreal, was disqualified from comment. Canadiens owner Geoff Molson got a tongue lashing for his arena’s apparent safety failings. Politicians were media hogs.

While Chara’s five-minute foul produced a catastrophic result, Cherry defended the league for its lack of a suspension. It was, he felt, the clichéd “hockey play” like others on his video reel. Bizarrely, he insisted Chara deserved a 20-game suspension or none at all. Just another case of unwinding the police tape with a nothing-to-see-here shake of the head.

Milbury didn’t touch the suspension or the hit, preferring to advance the story by asking GMs this week at the general meeting to decide, “What’s an acceptable risk for players?” Milbury, who seemed restrained in his Hockey Night’s Hotstove segment (perhaps his Boston roots?), urged a panel to create a comprehensive, not knee-jerk reaction. Milbury was cogent and remarkably restrained for his often-voluble self. In doing so he’s pressing Cherry to raise his game.

Ready answer

The GMs already have a partial solution in the Vancouver Canucks and Detroit Red Wings. The NHL’s two best teams don’t goon and intimidate. Hockey Night (and its TSN/ Sportsnet equivalent) don’t seem able to grasp this salient fact. They lionize the Matt Cookes, Trevor Gillies and Colton Orrs as being essential to winning hockey. But the Canucks and Red Wings play another, safer way. And they win. Imagine that.

Tone deaf

Hockey Night’s performance in the face of the (sometimes hysterical) firestorm was still better than that of the NHL, with commissioner Gary Bettman putting his hands over his ears while saying, “La-la-la-la, I can’t hear you” to the Prime Minister, corporate leaders and media commentators last week.

Whether Bettman likes it or not, this is hockey’s Dale Earnhardt moment, the time when the speed of the cars and the aggression of the drivers overwhelms the race track. As NASCAR did when its brightest star Earnhardt was killed at the Daytona 500 in 2001, hockey has to take its foot off the accelerator and take stock of how much risk is acceptable. (Earnhardt was the fourth driver to die in NASCAR within a year; since revising its safety standards, no NASCAR driver has died since.) No matter how impulsive Air Canada’s media onslaught seemed, who wants a dead NHL player photographed lying in front of your corporate logo on the boards? Bettman’s petulant response to the week’s criticism, however, indicates he’s still got the pedal to the floor and his fingers in his ears.

Union due

Neither Cherry nor Milbury addressed the NHLPA’s mediocre history on safety issues. The union’s diligence on workplace safety was left to former player Mathieu Schneider, newly minted as hockey mentor to current executive director Don (What’s a Puck?) Fehr.

On Hockey Night’s pregame show Saturday, Schneider cited Chara’s lack of premeditation as the basis for absolution. But intent is just one element of culpability in courts. Chara’s act illustrates the difference between premeditation and negligence – both punishable. What we really wanted to know – and did not find out – was whether the PA had intervened on behalf of Chara or Pacioretty in the NHL’s hearings last week. The PA has had a lamentable habit of protecting aggressors over victims within its own membership.

A 10-step hockey reformation as imagined by John Allemang

JOHN ALLEMANG
From Saturday's Globe and Mail
Published Friday, Mar. 11, 2011


Hockey can't go on like this. The daily carnage has become too much to bear, and there's no excuse to look the other way just because the sport attracts fans and fits a monopolistic kind of business model. Never mind that politicians, police and prominent sponsors are challenging the National Hockey League's complacency on injuries and violence, so far without much success. The bigger issue is about how professional hockey lost its way and allowed the game to get so far out of sync with the nation's better values.

1. Get rid of the boards. There are two games of lacrosse, one played in a rink or box, the other on a field. They're two very different, very separate games and each has its fans. The pond-hockey tradition in hockey is beloved even by people who like the high-energy National Hockey League game – which raises the question of whether hockey truly needs boards at all. Most serious hockey injuries happen close to the boards, and if you took away the game's hard boundaries, hitting from behind or crushing a player's head into a stanchion would become relics of the past. The NHL's business plan is based on a game played within boards, but there's no reason not to experiment with a boardless game that's just about ice. Yes, it might look more like field hockey on skates. But isn't that how the great Gordie Howe got his start?

2. Ban head hits. The NHL overlords work themselves into ridiculous contortions to justify hits to the head. Yes, hockey's a fast game, accidents happen and players put themselves in vulnerable positions where injuries can result. But the blame-the-victim strategy is unnecessary, as well as ineffective and inhuman. Simply follow the example of the International Ice Hockey Federation and take a zero-tolerance approach to head hits. A body-contact sport should be just that – contact with the body.

3. Increase ice size. Players are bigger, faster, stronger, but the narrow NHL rink remains unevolved. International hockey is played on rinks that are 15 feet wider, giving skaters much more room to manoeuvre and avoid harmful contact against the boards. Studies by neurologist Richard Wennberg of Toronto Western Hospital have shown that collisions and head injuries decrease in number and severity in the international rinks. Hockey on a bigger ice surface can be a more agile, free-flowing game, better suited to speedy, smaller skill players and less tolerant of the kind of smothering defensive tactics practised by a tentacled behemoth like Zdeno Chara.

4. Go to four on four. Increasing the rink size will take time and money, and there's a persuasive argument to be made that the compact NHL surfaces create a more intense and energetic style of hockey. In that case, do what is now done in overtime games to encourage offence and speed up play: Simply drop one of the skaters. By opening up more room on the ice, you give players more time to handle the puck and protect themselves from incoming threats. And with fewer players, goon tactics will become less valuable and aggressive body contact less useful – the culture of the sport will shift to a more free-flowing skaters' game.

5. Put an end to fighting. It has nothing to do with the sport, it's harmful and contrived, it discourages skilled young athletes from continuing in the game, puts off more fans than it draws in, dumbs down Canadian culture and isn't necessary despite what all the NHL apologists and armchair sadists contend. Other professional sports manage to ban fighting without losing their appeal or sacrificing their macho DNA. So just get rid of it, and let the lovers of mindless brutality get their fix with mixed-martial arts.

6. Treat violence as violence. Punishment rarely fits the crime in NHL hockey, except for rare moments of damage control where public outrage leads to PR-driven clampdowns. If NHL bosses refuse to punish violent acts like Zdeno Chara's hit against Max Pacioretty, then it's right that police should step in and sponsors should walk away, if only to send a message that both players and the league must be more responsible for their actions. If respect for fellow players can't be taught – and there's every reason to think coaches from minor hockey up instill the opposite message – then basic humanity has to be legislated by the courts and demanded by those who associate their corporate name with the sport.

7. No more “finishing the check.” The hockey rule book mandates a safe, orderly and fair game. But the latitude given to officials means that there is often a huge discrepancy between the rules of the sport and the arbitrary judgment calls on the ice. One of the more dangerous examples of this legalized lawlessness occurs when players are permitted to hit someone after he releases the puck. A player is often at his most vulnerable at this moment – much like a quarterback who has just thrown a pass. Yet hockey coaches at every level still encourage these checks and shift the responsibility for avoiding them from the aggressor to the victim. But checkers shouldn't have carte blanche: It must be made clear that there can be no body contact once the puck is released or not in the player's control.

8. Speed the flow of the game. A game like soccer is continuous: Substitutions have to fit into the course of the game and even on-field injuries don't necessarily stop play. Professional hockey has gone in the other direction and turned itself into a stop-and-start sport that breaks for TV ads, coach-mandated time-outs, between-period corporate networking and seemingly endless line changes. At the aesthetic level, the game is at its best when it's moving fast and furious – overtime hockey is compelling viewing. But there's also a safety issue. With modern hockey's short shifts, players are able to play more “physically,” targeting the body more than in a game where shifts drag on (as can be seen in the rebroadcasts of surprisingly gentle 1950s games that now look nothing like old-time hockey's tough-guy image).

9. Softer pads. Players don't need body armour to play good hockey. Hulking shoulder pads, in particular, do more harm than good, because they're less about protection than they are about inflicting damage, especially at the head level. And the more a player's equipment makes him feel protected from retaliation, the more confident he feels about dishing out pain. Hockey equipment is like a Cold War arms race, but the mutual escalation of physical force and physical protection no longer serves its purpose.

10. Get rid of coaches. Okay, it's not going to happen. But there are far too many coaches on the hockey bench intruding themselves into too many aspects of the game. As hockey has become overcoached, it has lost its breathtaking, spontaneous side, the throwback joie de vivre style displayed by the winning Russian team at this year's world junior championships. Players at all levels now feel tied down by defensive strategies where avoiding mistakes is seen as the key to winning. But what's worse from a safety point of view is that when you turn players into robotic automatons, you take away their judgment and responsibility. Most injuries in hockey occur because a player is just doing his job.

John Allemang is a feature writer for The Globe and Mail.

Here's an interesting article about the use of praise in education. Do you you think the same pertains to hockey?
Original: http://www.nea.org/home/42298.htm

The Praise Paradox: Are we smothering kids in kind words?

By Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman

Thomas (his middle name) is a fifth-grader at the highly competitive P.S. 334, the Anderson School on West 84th in New York City. Since Thomas could walk, he has constantly heard that he is smart. Not just from his parents but from any adult who has come in contact with this precocious child. When he applied to Anderson for kindergarten, his intelligence was statistically confirmed. The school is reserved for the top 1 percent of all applicants, and an IQ test is required. Thomas didn’t just score in the top 1 percent. He scored in the top 1 percent of the top 1 percent.

But as Thomas has progressed through school, this self-awareness that he’s smart hasn’t always translated into fearless confidence when attacking his schoolwork. In fact, Thomas’s father noticed just the opposite. “Thomas didn’t want to try things he wouldn’t be successful at,” his father says. “Some things came very quickly to him, but when they didn’t, he gave up almost immediately, concluding, ‘I’m not good at this.’” With no more than a glance, Thomas was dividing the world into two—things he was naturally good at and things he wasn’t.

For instance, in the early grades, Thomas wasn’t very good at spelling, so he simply demurred from spelling out loud. When Thomas took his first look at fractions, he balked. The biggest hurdle came in third grade. He was supposed to learn cursive penmanship, but he wouldn’t even try for weeks. By then, his teacher was demanding homework be completed in cursive. Rather than play catch-up on his penmanship, Thomas refused outright. Thomas’s father tried to reason with him. “Look, just because you’re smart doesn’t mean you don’t have to put out some effort.” (Eventually, Thomas mastered cursive, but not without a lot of cajoling from his father.)

Why does this child, who is measurably at the very top of the charts, lack confidence about his ability to tackle routine school challenges?

Thomas is not alone. For a few decades, it’s been noted that a large percentage of all gifted students (those who score in the top 10 percent on aptitude tests) severely underestimate their own abilities. Those afflicted with this lack of perceived competence adopt lower standards for success and expect less of themselves. They underrate the importance of effort, and they overrate how much help they need from a parent.

When parents praise their children’s intelligence, they believe they are providing the solution to this problem. According to a survey conducted by Columbia University, 85 percent of American parents think it’s important to tell their kids that they’re smart. In and around the New York area, according to my own (admittedly nonscientific) poll, the number is more like 100 percent. Everyone does it, habitually. “You’re so smart, Kiddo,” just seems to roll off the tongue.

“Early and often,” bragged one mom, of how often she praised. Another dad throws praise around “every chance I get.” I heard that kids are going to school with affirming handwritten notes in their lunchboxes and—when they come home—there are star charts on the refrigerator. Boys are earning baseball cards for clearing their plates after dinner, and girls are winning manicures for doing their homework. These kids are saturated with messages that they’re doing great—that they are great, innately so. They have what it takes.

The presumption is that if a child believes he’s smart (having been told so, repeatedly), he won’t be intimidated by new academic challenges. The constant praise is meant to be an angel on the shoulder, ensuring that children do not sell their talents short.

But a growing body of research—and a new study from the trenches of the New York City public school system—strongly suggest it might be the other way around. Giving kids the label of “smart” does not prevent them from underperforming. It might actually be causing it.

For the past ten years, Dr. Carol Dweck and her team at Columbia University have studied the effect of praise on students in 20 New York schools. Her seminal work—a series of experiments on 400 fifth-graders—paints the picture most clearly. Prior to these experiments, praise for intelligence had been shown to boost children’s confidence. But Dweck suspected that this would backfire the first moment kids experienced failure or difficulty.

Dweck sent four female research assistants into New York fifth-grade classrooms. The researchers would take a single child out of the classroom for a nonverbal IQ test consisting of a series of puzzles—puzzles easy enough that all the children would do fairly well. Once the child finished the test, the researchers told each student his score, then gave him a single line of praise. Randomly divided into groups, some were praised for their intelligence. They were told, “You must be smart at this.” Other students were praised for their effort: “You must have worked really hard.”

Why just a single line of praise? “We wanted to see how sensitive children were,” Dweck explained. “We had a hunch that one line might be enough to see an effect.”

Then the students were given a choice of test for the second round. One choice was a test that would be more difficult than the first, but the researchers told the kids that they’d learn a lot from attempting the puzzles. The other choice, Dweck’s team explained, was an easy test, just like the first. Of those praised for their effort, 90 percent chose the harder set of puzzles. Of those praised for their intelligence, a majority chose the easy test. The “smart” kids took the cop-out.

Why did this happen? “When we praise children for their intelligence,” Dweck wrote in her study summary, “we tell them that this is the name of the game: look smart, don’t risk making mistakes.” And that’s what the fifth-graders had done. They’d chosen to look smart and avoid the risk of being embarrassed.

In a subsequent round, none of the fifth-graders had a choice. The test was difficult, designed for kids two years ahead of their grade level. Predictably, everyone failed. But again, the two groups of children, divided at random at the study’s start, responded differently. Those praised for their effort on the first test assumed they simply hadn’t focused hard enough on this test. “They got very involved, willing to try every solution to the puzzles,” Dweck recalled. “Many of them remarked, unprovoked, ‘This is my favorite test.’” Not so for those praised for their smarts. They assumed their failure was evidence that they weren’t really smart at all. “Just watching them, you could see the strain. They were sweating and miserable.”

Having artificially induced a round of failure, Dweck’s researchers then gave all the fifth-graders a final round of tests that were engineered to be as easy as the first round. Those who had been praised for their effort significantly improved on their first score—by about 30 percent. Those who’d been told they were smart did worse than they had at the very beginning—by about 20 percent.

Dweck had suspected that praise could backfire, but even she was surprised by the magnitude of the effect. “Emphasizing effort gives a child a variable that they can control,” she explains. “They come to see themselves as in control of their success. Emphasizing natural intelligence takes it out of the child’s control, and it provides no good recipe for responding to a failure.”

In follow-up interviews, Dweck discovered that those who think that innate intelligence is the key to success begin to discount the importance of effort. I am smart, the kids’ reasoning goes; I don’t need to put out effort. Expending effort becomes stigmatized—it’s public proof that you can’t cut it on your natural gifts.

Repeating her experiments, Dweck found this effect of praise on performance held true for students of every socioeconomic class. It hit both boys and girls—the very brightest girls especially (they collapsed the most following failure). Even preschoolers weren’t immune to the inverse power of praise.

Even those who’ve accepted the new research on praise have trouble putting it into practice. Sue Needleman is both a mother of two and an elementary school teacher with 11 years’ experience. Last year, she was a fourth-grade teacher at Ridge Ranch Elementary in Paramus, New Jersey. She has never heard of Carol Dweck, but the gist of Dweck’s research has trickled down to her school, and Needleman has learned to say, “I like how you keep trying.” She tries to keep her praise specific, rather than general, so that a child knows exactly what she did to earn the praise (and thus can get more). She will occasionally tell a child, “You’re good at math,” but she’ll never tell a child he’s bad at math.

But that’s at school, as a teacher. At home, old habits die hard. Her eight-year-old daughter and her five-year-old son are indeed smart, and sometimes she hears herself saying, “You’re great. You did it. You’re smart.” When I press her on this, Needleman says that what comes out of academia often feels artificial. “When I read the mock dialogues, my first thought is, Oh, please. How corny.”

No such qualms exist for teachers at the Life Sciences Secondary School in East Harlem, because they’ve seen Dweck’s theories applied to their junior high students. Dweck and her protégée, Dr. Lisa Blackwell, published a report in the academic journal Child Development about the effect of a semester-long intervention conducted to improve students’ math scores.

Life Sciences is a health-science magnet school with high aspirations but 700 students whose main attributes are being predominantly minority and low achieving. Blackwell split her kids into two groups for an eight-session workshop. The control group was taught study skills, and the others got study skills and a special module on how intelligence is not innate. These students took turns reading aloud an essay on how the brain grows new neurons when challenged. They saw slides of the brain and acted out skits. “Even as I was teaching these ideas,” Blackwell noted, “I would hear the students joking, calling one another ‘dummy’ or ‘stupid.’” After the module was concluded, Blackwell tracked her students’ grades to see if it had any effect.

It didn’t take long. The teachers—who hadn’t known which students had been assigned to which workshop—could pick out the students who had been taught that intelligence can be developed. They improved their study habits and grades. In a single semester, Blackwell reversed the students’ longtime trend of decreasing math grades.

The only difference between the control group and the test group were two lessons, a total of 50 minutes spent teaching not math but a single idea: that the brain is a muscle. Giving it a harder workout makes you smarter. That alone improved their math scores.

“These are very persuasive findings,” says Columbia’s Dr. Geraldine Downey, a specialist in children’s sensitivity to rejection. “They show how you can take a specific theory and develop a curriculum that works.”

Psychologist Wulf-Uwe Meyer, a pioneer in the field, conducted a series of studies during which children watched other students receive praise. According to Meyer’s findings, by the age of 12, children believe that earning praise from a teacher is not a sign you did well—it’s actually a sign you lack ability and the teacher thinks you need extra encouragement. They’ve picked up the pattern: kids who are falling behind get drowned in praise. Teens, Meyer found, discounted praise to such an extent that they believed it’s a teacher’s criticism that really conveys a positive belief in a student’s aptitude.

Excessive praise also distorts children’s motivation; they begin doing things merely to hear the praise, losing sight of intrinsic enjoyment. Scholars from Reed College and Stanford reviewed over 150 praise studies. Their analysis determined that praised students become risk-averse and lack perceived autonomy. The scholars found consistent correlations between a liberal use of praise and students’ “shorter task persistence, more eye-checking with the teacher, and inflected speech such that answers have the intonation of questions.” When they get to college, heavily praised students commonly drop out of classes rather than suffer a mediocre grade, and they have a hard time picking a major—they’re afraid to commit to something because they’re afraid of not succeeding.

One suburban New Jersey high school English teacher told me she can spot the kids who get overpraised at home. Their parents think they’re just being supportive, but the students sense their parents’ high expectations, and feel so much pressure they can’t concentrate on the subject, only the grade they will receive. “I had a mother say, ‘You are destroying my child’s self-esteem,’ because I’d given her son a C. I told her, ‘Your child is capable of better work.’ I’m not there to make them feel better. I’m there to make them do better.”

When students transition into junior high, some who’d done well in elementary school inevitably struggle in the larger and more demanding environment. Those who equated their earlier success with their innate ability surmise they’ve been dumb all along. Their grades never recover because the likely key to their recovery—increasing effort—they view as just further proof of their failure. In interviews many confess they would “seriously consider cheating.”

Students turn to cheating because they haven’t developed a strategy for handling failure. The problem is compounded when a parent ignores a child’s failures and insists that he’ll do it better next time. Michigan scholar Jennifer Crocker studies this exact scenario and explains that the child may come to believe failure is something so terrible, the family can’t acknowledge its existence. A child deprived of the opportunity to discuss mistakes can’t learn from them.

Offering praise has become a sort of panacea for the anxieties of modern parenting. Out of our children’s lives from breakfast to dinner, we turn it up a notch when we get home. In those few hours together, we want them to hear things we can’t say during the day—We are in your corner, we are here for you, we believe in you.

In a similar way, we put our children in high-pressure environments, seeking out the best schools we can find, then we use the constant praise to soften the intensity of those environments. We expect so much of them, but we hide our expectations behind constant glowing praise. For me, the duplicity became glaring.

I realized that not telling my son he was smart meant I was leaving it up to him to make his own conclusion about his intelligence. Jumping in with praise is like jumping in too soon with the answer to a homework problem—it robs him of the chance to make the deduction himself.

But what if he makes the wrong conclusion?

Can I really leave this up to him, at his age?

I’m still an anxious parent. This morning, I tested him on the way to school: “What happens to your brain, again, when it gets to think about something hard?”

“It gets bigger, like a muscle,” he responded, having aced this one before.

CULLEN: HOCKEY AT THE SLOAN SPORTS ANALYTICS CONFERENCE

SCOTT CULLEN TSN 3/11/2011


After detailing my time last week at the Sloan Sports Analytics Conference here, I had promised a look at more hockey-centric themes from the conference in a future blog.

This is that stats-oriented stick-and-puck blog.

Part of the reason for making my inaugural trek to the conference was that this year was the first year that they had a Hockey Analytics panel. I know baseball is at the forefront of the stats movement and that basketball has been getting on the fast track in recent years but, going to the conference, I really wasn't sure how NHL teams use advanced analytics.

Now that I'm home, I still don't know, but my suspicion is that it's not nearly enough.

In any case, we'll begin this recap with the Saturday morning panel, moderated by Katie Burke, daughter of Maple Leafs GM Brian Burke and the Chair of the Alumni Executive Board for the conference.

The panel consisted of:
Stan Bowman, the general manager of the Stanley Cup-champion Chicago Blackhawks;
Jeff Solomon, VP of Hockey Operations and Legal Affairs, Los Angeles Kings;
Dan MacKinnon, Director of Player Personnel, Pittsburgh Penguins;
Don Fishman, Assistant GM and Director of Legal Affairs, Washington Capitals;
Jim Price, President, RinkNet

Bowman acknowledged that he broke into the hockey business on the finance side of things and used statistics to help improve his value on the operations side.

Admittedly, however, hockey's statistical analysis isn't the most refined. Bowman noted that the initial way of evaluating players internally consisted of having the coach give a player a rating (out of five) after each game.

The trouble with that subjective rating was that coaches tended to overvalue grinders in that format. With no expectations to score, a grinder would get a good grade provided they did the requisite skating and hitting, whereas a skilled forward that was expected to score would tend not to generate good ratings unless he produced offensively.

While the Blackhawks still use the subjective measurement, it's been combined with statistical measures that help smooth out the ratings. Bowman wasn't specific in detailing what stats the Blackhawks use, which is understandable, but there was no hinting that the Blackhawks have some special stats that they keep on their own.

When you consider the stats revolution that is taking place in basketball, for example, it's easy to grasp from Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban and Houston Rockets GM Daryl Morey (two of the more prominent execs at the Sloan Sports Analytics Conference) that their organizations keep stats that aren't readily accessible in the public domain, but there wasn't even any hint in that regard from the hockey panel, that their teams have, say, a metric for clearing the zone successfully while under pressure (for defencemen).

I found Solomon to be interesting because he was a former player agent and, from an agent's perspective, I could see advanced statistics really coming in handy when it comes to contract negotiation time and given the reputation of a baseball agent like Scott Boras for statistical preparation as a source of leverage when it comes time to conduct contract talks, I wouldn't be surprised if there are hockey agents that are more progressive on the stats front than their counterparts in NHL front offices.

To that end, Solomon seemed to be open to more statistical input, but acknowledged that the NHL seemed to be at least five years behind the other sports when it comes to using advanced statistical measures.

MacKinnon and Fishman had what amounted to team marquee value, since they represented those involved in HBO's 24-7 Capitals-Penguins. While it was clear that both thirst for more information, it didn't seem like they were heavy into advanced statistical measures.

When MacKinnon made the point that he doesn't even know the stats lines of the Penguins prospects, insisting that the projection required for prospects is too great to get overly concerned about their junior or college stats, I was at least gratified by Bowman's assertion that if a player is being projected as a scoring forward in the NHL, then they have to have a certain level of scoring accomplishment in junior.

That's not to say a productive junior player is guaranteed to score as a pro, but it's very, very rare for a player to score at a higher rate as he moves up the developmental ladder.

Additionally, I simply can't imagine that there can't be metrics, especially when combined with scouting information, to help measure the likelihood of a prospect reaching expectations in the NHL.

Remember when Angelo Esposito scored 98 points as a QMJHL rookie in 2005-2006, then fell to 79 points the next year and yet the Penguins still drafted him 20th overall in 2007?

Even before the knee injuries that seem to have derailed his prospect status, the dip in Esposito's production (to 69 points in 2007-2008) had to be some cause for concern; something that, with the right metric, the numbers may have brought to light before the decline was so apparent.

Admittedly, part of the trouble when dealing with the statistics of junior and college hockey players is that there is such a wide variance in the calibre of teammates and opposition.

I still expect that the kind of bright minds involved at this conference would be able to figure out ways to include strength of teammates and opposition into the metrics, so that numbers aren't just thrown out entirely.

This is a common challenge for those in analytics, trying to get good data included, rather than thrown away altogether because it doesn't necessarily have the all-encompassing answer in a single number. Making a decision that is even 10% smarter is still worthwhile, believe it or not.

One of the more frustrating moments, for me, during this panel was a sequence in which MacKinnon, Fishman and Bowman all took shots at the value of plus-minus, because it doesn't measure strength of opposition and some players get "easy minutes" and/or players may be benefitting from playing with stronger teammates.

This is an entirely valid concern, but hardly limited to plus-minus.

I get it, plus-minus is hardly the be-all and end-all of stats, but doesn't who a player plays with and against affect everything they do on the ice? Don't tell me that playing on Sidney Crosby's wing brings the same expectations for goal scoring, or even shots on goal, as it does for those skating alongside Mike Rupp, and that's before we even get to who they match up against on other teams.

My view is that all stats need to put into context if they are going to have value. Go back to Esposito's rookie season in the Q, when he was so highly-touted after scoring 98 points. He was the second-highest scorer on his team that season, a mere 54 (!) points behind Alexander Radulov. Given that context, wouldn't that undermine the pure total of 98 points all on its own?

Conversely, one of this year's first-round prospects, Matt Puempel of the Peterborough Petes, is having a productive year, scoring 69 points in 55 games, ahead of teammate Austin Watson, who was a first-round pick of the Nashville Predators last summer.

Puempel is also minus-33 on a brutal Petes team that has 13 skaters with a rating at minus-20 or lower. When put into the context of his team's overall troubles, Puempel's value as a draft prospect doesn't seem to be affected much (if at all) by his plus-minus.

Fishman did, however, use context to bring Alexander Ovechkin's struggles to light, saying that Ovechkin's even-strength production was still good, but that his real struggles have come on the power play, a unit that has struggled as a whole for Washington.

Ovechkin has six power play goals in 68 games this season, well behind the pace of last year's 13 power play goals in 72 games that was his previous career low.

One of the presenters that I met with at the conference was Brian Macdonald, an assistant math professor at West Point, who had devised an adjusted plus-minus statistic that accounted for teammates, opposition, zone start and could be used as a measure for special teams as well.

Anytime you're dealing with advanced stats for the first time, it's nice to at least see some results off the top that make sense and while discussion with Brian revealed some of the surprised that he thought might be flukes (like Jason Pominville among the top even-strength defensive wingers), there's something to be said for identifying value in typically underrated players like Jan Hejda and Mike Weaver on the defensive metric.

I still need to spend more time going through Macdonald's numbers, but I obviously like his idea of trying to account for strength of teammates and opposition to devise his numbers because it helps provide context.

Michael Schuckers, an associate statistics professor at St. Lawrence University, comprised a defense-independent goaltender rating, which attempted to remove the quality of shot distribution that each goaltender faces, evaluating goaltenders based on a league-wide shot distribution and quality.

Again, the numbers require some investigation, but the result showed Ryan Miller as the best in the league, with numbers that indicated that the Sabres effectively surrendered a league-average quality of shots against last season.

At the lower end of the scale, for last season, Tim Thomas and Jimmy Howard were a couple of the goaltenders that would have fared substantially worse if given league-average shot quality.

On the surface, the theory is interesting and given the rise of fielding independent pitching in baseball, defense independent goaltending in hockey makes sense as a measure too.

I also ran into Adam Gold, who runs www.WinningUnlimited.com. Adam has done some stats work for the St. Louis Blues, but his pet project is much more ambitious, trying to change the way the league sets its draft order based on when a team is eliminated from the postseason.

For a league that has shown zero interest in changing an already massively-flawed standings model, Adam has a big hill to climb, but part of the beauty of the Sloan Conference is getting unique ideas like his.

One of the presentations I didn't get to -- and I most defintely regret -- was e-mailed to me after the fact (the beauty of TSN's reach in the hockey community), Does Decision Order Matter? An Empirical Analysis of the NHL Draft, by Michael Brydon and Peter Tingling, assistant business professors at Simon Fraser who focus on decision theory when examining NHL drafts from 1995 through 2003, revealed just how random the results of the NHL draft tend to be.

Their findings suggest that, while some teams may hold an advantage in early rounds, a lot of teams do no better than random chance at the draft table and, even without advanced statistical measures being utilized, could be improved upon simply with better decision-making processes.

Now, if an NHL team really wanted to go crazy, maybe they could use improved decision-making processes and advanced statistical data to really come up with a comparitive advantage over the opposition.

On the Hockey Analytics panel, MacKinnon seemed most interested in having an expanded statistical reach in junior and college hockey, tracking more than mere goals and assists, but there was no real suggestion about how that would occur.

Is it valuable enough information that NHL's Central Scouting would be responsible for increasing the statistical measures in developmental leagues?

There does seem like a desire for knowledge but, as it is with any sports, it's fair to question how analytics can be applied to give a team an advantage.

When one considers that the Dallas Mavericks, for example, have a full-time statistical analyst (Roland Beech) on the payroll, and estimates at the conference indicated that there may be 20 NBA teams with someone in charge of providing analytics, Mark Cuban's position seems appropriate. "The way I look at it, relative to the cost," said Cuban in a recent Time Magazine interview, "if (Beech) wins me one game, he's paid for himself."

While there surely are some NHL teams that use analytics, I'm not yet sure how widespread it is in practice. This league still seems awfully old school in a lot of ways. No, really, it does.

The Minnesota Wild hired former sports writer Chris Snow to take on a position that would help them address contract negotiations, arbitration, free agency and the draft, but he was let go when a new regime took over.

While some teams may have consulting done when it comes to analytics, it still seems like an area ripe for improvement in many cases.

As mentioned in my previous post on the conference, scouting information can be combined with analytics, so there really ought to be more efficient methods of doing business for NHL teams. If a team's analytics department is able to help with an arbitration case, a draft pick, a contract negotiation, a savvy trade, isn't any one of those things likely to be worth the salary of one full-time employee?

Maybe they're all doing it and we just don't know about it but, as I say, I'm suspicious that this is an under-utilized method of evaluation, both in terms of player and contract value.

Part of the reason may be this unfortunate point about analytics in hockey that was presented by Fishman. As analytics would seem like a prime tool when going to arbitration with a player, one of the downsides of the process is that the arbitrators tend not to know hockey particularly well so the statistics that end up being used are very basic.

That being the case, it means that even trying to convince an arbitrator that adjusted plus-minus is a much better true measure of a player's value seems like a battle not worth fighting.

Can a hockey team embrace this kind of analysis?

Under a salary cap system in which teams at the top are forced to make ruthless financial decisions all the time and teams at the lower end of the pay scale are run on tight budgets, how can teams not adopt something that would allow them to make better decisions with their money?

I have lots of questions, but still need answers. Maybe someone could provide some analytics on this for me.

Young hockey players hit the ice, then the books

INGRID PERITZ Shediac, N.B.— From Saturday's Globe and Mail
Published Friday, Mar. 11, 2011

The Atom hockey practice at the Shediac arena takes players through their skating, shooting and stick-handling drills. But the coach saves his most popular training tip for last.

Standing in the locker room after practice, coach Shane Doiron delivers his instructions to the roomful of nine- and 10-year-old boys, who’ve unlaced their skates and packed up their gear.

“Now,” he says, “we’re going to do our reading.”

The boys reach for books: The weekly Shediac Capitals reading circle is under way.

For three years, Mr. Doiron has parlayed his position as a hockey coach to instill a love of books among his grade-school charges. Driven by his own regrets at sidelining reading while he pursued a hockey career, he’s trying to get his players to find inspiration between the covers of books as much as on the ice.

In doing so, he’s using Canada’s game to overcome boys’ lagging reading scores.

“I spend hours and hours teaching them to skate and shoot pucks,” the 36-year-old coach says. “This teaches them life. It’s a gift.”

Mr. Doiron’s book club reaches to the heart of a critical problem in Canada. The literacy gap is growing between boys and girls, leaving boys trailing in the reading and writing skills they need for academic achievement.

The reading group in Shediac, a community outside Moncton on New Brunswick’s east coast, tries to avoid the pitfalls associated with boys’ disaffection for books.

Here, reading’s not a girly thing. The adulated male coach is a reader. And the players are given a selection of books to choose from, almost all of them about hockey and adventures. A favourite this year is Le Zamboni, about a junior goalie who enters the belly of an ice-smoothing machine and its magical dream machine.

Mr. Doiron insists on recruiting fathers for the club, which unfolds in the chummy atmosphere of the post-practice dressing room. When the coach gives the signal, the 17 team members split off into groups of threes and fours and huddle on the benches with a volunteer dad. At this week’s gathering, fathers leaned in to hear the boys’ animated talk about their reading. Mr. Doiron led one group, kneeling on the floor before a clutch of rapt boys, who were going over the action in a book about the exploits of a gang of young adventurers on a deserted island. (Most of the books are in French, the language of the boys’ schooling.)

Mr. Doiron asks the boys to spend about 20 minutes reading before bedtime. No one’s punished for not doing it, but they’re told they would be letting their teammates down.

“I tell them to finish the day with a good book.” Mr. Doiron says. “I explain that reading is part of exercise. The more you exercise your brain the better you think on the ice. But it’s not work, it’s fun.”

The recipe seems to work. Parents tell him their sons are picking up books unprompted, and their grades at school have improved.

“Sometimes my son will say to me, ‘Dad, let’s read, I’ve got to get my reading done,’ ” says Keith Allain, father of nine-year-old Samuel. “Before, reading for him was a chore. Now it’s part of his routine. I’ll see him grab a book.”

The boys seem to be won over. Pausing in his gear before heading onto the ice, 10-year-old Jason Gallant says he’s spending less time on his Xbox. “I read instead. When I’m bored I take a book.”

Mr. Doiron’s determination to put books in boys’ hands took root in his own experience with hockey. He grew up in a small community near Shediac, where boys like him lived and breathed the game. Reading, he recalls, just “wasn’t cool.”

His skills as a defenceman catapulted him to the major juniors, but by age 19 the dream of an NHL career had faded. He enrolled in university. That’s where, while trying to read a biology text for class, he realized his reading skills were too weak for him to keep up. “Here I was and I only knew one thing in life: hockey, and nothing else.”

Mr. Doiron stuck with his studies and graduated with honours in civil-engineering technology. And when he became a minor-hockey coach, he decided he would help give his players the opportunities he’d missed.

“I didn’t want them to be like I was at age 20. I wanted them to be able to make choices that I didn’t have,” says Mr. Doiron, a father of three who works for the federal government. “We have this great tool in Canada. It’s called hockey. We have it in every small town and village in this country. There have been too many horror stories about hockey coaches. Stories of abuse. I want hockey to do good.”

Mr. Doiron’s mix of no-nonsense authority and big-hearted commitment to his players seem to be key. His words carry the kind of weight that parents might envy.

“A hockey coach is like a demigod,” says Manon Jolicoeur, who wrote her master’s thesis at the University of Moncton on the Shediac reading circle. “When he says something, he doesn’t have to repeat it.”

Ms. Jolicoeur found that even “disengaged” boys who were initially the least interested in books signed on for the coach’s club. “Their parents didn’t have to remind them, like they did for school. When the boys read for the book club, they read for themselves.” She adds: “What’s interesting is that all of them, without exception, said the same thing, ‘On my next team, I’d like it if my coach asks me to read.’ ”

Each Monday, the preadolescent boys who file into the Shediac arena arrive with a freezer-sized Ziploc bag. It contains their book, a pencil and a notebook, in which they’ve jotted down notes or a drawing about that week’s reading. It’s become so entrenched that one boy, Félix LeBlanc, was sitting out the practice due to a knee injury this week but showed up clutching his Ziploc bag anyway.

That bag is, in many ways, a testament to Mr. Doiron’s success. “At the end of the year, if I’ve developed 17 kids on the ice and off the ice, it’s worth more than one championship. Because a championship is one day. Reading is for a lifetime.”

Maybe he should make it his mantra: He Shoots. He Reads. He Scores.

Hitting younger not always better

From Wednesday's Globe and Mail HAYLEY MICK Published Tuesday, Mar. 15, 2011


In his latest study on hockey injuries, Michael Cusimano has zeroed in on an old debate: can allowing bodychecking at a younger age improve safety by teaching kids to hit properly?

The study, published Tuesday in the journal Open Medicine, centred around the 1998-99 youth hockey season, when Hockey Canada lowered the legal age for body contact to include Atom-level players. The rule change introduced boys as young as nine to the hits. (Previously, only those aged 12 years and older could bodycheck. The rules have since been reversed so the earliest age of allowable body contact is with 11-year-old Pee Wee players.)

Dr. Cusimano, a neurosurgeon and researcher at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto, and his colleagues found that the Atom-aged kids were more than two times as likely to be injured from bodychecking after the rule changes took effect. Interestingly, the rate of head injuries increased by 26 per cent overall, including in the older age groups. Head and necks were among the body parts that saw the biggest jump in injury rates.

The results were based on a total of 8,552 hockey-related injuries reported at five Ontario hospitals during a 10-year period beginning in 1994. Injuries reported before the rule change were compared to those suffered after the rule change in players ages nine to 17.

The take-home message: “If we want to protect kids’ brains, then we need to seriously consider what is the value of allowing bodychecking in youth hockey,” Dr. Cusimano says.

Dr. Cusimano detailed the findings for The Globe and Mail from Toronto.

You found that the odds of being injured increased in all age groups after the rule change, but the most significant increase happened with Atom players, when kids were first exposed to bodychecking. Why do you think that is?

As soon as you expose a person to a risk, then you see a big jump. But the risk doesn’t go down later. It stays up. In fact, in some of the older age groups, the risk was also higher as well.

So is it possible that the increased risk of injury from bodychecking has nothing to do with age?

That’s right. If [body checking was first allowed at] age 18, [the increase] would probably have occurred when they were 18. If it was six, it probably would have occurred when they were six.

Can you continue that thought? Are you saying that bodychecking is just inherently dangerous, no matter how old you are?

I think there’s some truth in that. If you’ve got three-year-old kids who are doing it, there’s probably no intention in the three-year-olds to hurt each other. They haven’t developed that culture yet … they just want to have fun. Whereas by the time they get to 10, 11 years old, they’re starting to understand the culture of winning and the culture of what they’re supposed to be doing out there. So it would manifest there.

In your paper, you point to several other studies that have showed that “learning to bodycheck at a younger age does not reduce a player’s odds of injury.” You add that allowing kids to start bodychecking earlier only prolongs their exposure to risk. But some people still argue that you can prevent injuries by teaching kids to bodycheck properly. Why do you think that idea persists?

I think it’s just a lack of understanding of what the data says. Who do you think are the best bodycheckers are in the world?

NHL players?

And who do you think has the highest rate of concussion in the world?

NHL players?

Well, if they knew how to give and take a check the best of anybody, why wouldn’t their rates be one of the lowest rates? It doesn’t have to do with learning to give or take a bodycheck. Look at Sidney Crosby. Is there any player in the world who has more skill than Crosby? Maybe [Alexander] Ovechkin. Maybe not. That’s like putting the blame on the player who receives the bodycheck. That’s a total misunderstanding of the inherent risk of the practice.

Maybe what they’re saying is that the people who are doing the bodychecking don’t know how do it properly.

Well, the same argument goes for the NHL then. Those guys know how to give a bodycheck. Those guys certainly know how to put Sidney Crosby out. And [Zdeno] Chara certainly knows how to put out [Max] Pacioretty. They know how to give it and they know how to take it, but the fact is, people are still getting injured. And ultimately the game is getting injured and damaged. Because if you’re a mother or father with a young child, you’re going to think twice … the kids are leaving the sport.

You’ve been sounding the alarm about violence in hockey for a long time, but have you noticed that the conversation has changed in the past year?

I think things are shifting. I think things like the Sidney Crosby event is sort of shifting the whole focus as well. People are coming around to recognizing: What’s the value in this practice of allowing kids to get their brains injured? And really, brains are our most precious resource. So why should we tolerate that?

NOTE: The script of this conversation has been edited and condensed.

The WHL and concussions: A mother cries out for help

Wednesday, March 16, 2011 Gregg Drinnan - Taking Note...Kamloops Sports


When Zdeno Chara ran Max Pacioretty into a turnbuckle in Montreal one night last week, who could have anticipated the aftermath?

Sheesh, even Air Canada and Via Rail got into the act, as did, predictably, the odd spotlight-seeking politician.

When things like this happen in places like Montreal and Boston, or Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, the tendency in our little corner of the world is to yawn, shrug and move on.

But if you are a fan of this great game of ours, perhaps you should be concerned. Because the rules changed this month.

When Boston University’s Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy revealed that the brain of former NHL enforcer Bob Probert exhibited "the same degenerative disease, chronic traumatic encephalopathy" that is connected to multiple concussions, the curtains were pulled back to reveal a whole new world.

Who in this generation could relate to CTE having been found in the brain of Reggie Fleming, who played in the NHL in the 1960s? Probert, though, is a different story. He’s recent. He’s more relevant.

That this news came with Sidney Crosby, the best player in the world, struggling with post-concussion syndrome only intensified the glare of the spotlight.

The WHL, if you haven’t noticed, isn’t a whole lot different than the NHL. Oh, the NHL’s players may be bigger, faster and more skilled, and they may get paid more, but the problems are the same.

And just like head shots and accompanying injuries are an epidemic in the NHL, they are an epidemic in the WHL.

In fact, a case can be made that concussions are more prevalent in the WHL than in the NHL.

No official numbers are available regarding the NHL, but the 30-team league has acknowledged that there have been about 80 players diagnosed with concussions this season.

The 22-team WHL’s weekly injury list, dated March 15, shows 11 players out with what are described as concussions or head injuries. That’s down from 21 the previous week. A study of this season’s 24 injury reports shows at least 97 instances in which a player has been shown as being out with a concussion or head injury. Eight players have twice been so injured, while one player appears to have had three head injuries.

The count also includes at least three players whose concussions have been season-ending.

And now the mother of a WHL player is wondering when enough is enough.

An email from her contains the subject line: Who killed Davey Moore?

———
Davey Moore, an American featherweight boxer, died of inoperable brain damage on March 25, 1963, four days after losing a bout at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles.

Shortly after, Bob Dylan penned the ballad Who Killed Davey Moore?

“Who killed Davey Moore?
Why an’ what’s the reason for?”

During the course of the song, the referee, the angry crowd, Moore’s manager, the gambling man, the boxing writer and Moore’s opponent all deny complicity in the boxer’s death.

———
“I am the mother of a WHL player and I feel sick watching our children inflicting and receiving potentially life altering injuries and saying nothing,” she wrote.

This being hockey, of course, she asked for anonymity “in order not to damage my child’s chances.”

The email and subsequent communications reveal a woman who is heartbroken at what she is witnessing as hockey becomes more and more violent, although not in the bench-clearing ways of days of yore.

No, her son hasn’t suffered a concussion or head injury this season. But she has seen enough, just the same.

“The players work so hard to get to the WHL that we as parents are loathe to get in the way of their success,” she wrote. “So we stand by and watch a 19-year-old have a seizure on the ice in the name of entertainment for the crowd.

“Then a 16-year-old is being punched by a 19-year-old and the crowd is delighted.

“We all know this is not right. How can we as parents send our kids into this and not object to the failure of this league to adequately protect them? Nobody is protecting our children. These are not consenting adults with million dollar contracts and a players association.”

In Kamloops this season, we have watched as two players had their seasons ended by especially violent physical encounters.

First, on Dec. 10, Kamloops right-winger Jordan DePape drilled Swift Current forward Killian Hutt with a blind-side hit that drew a five-game suspension. Hutt went into convulsions, left the ice on a stretcher and spent a night in hospital. He was left with a severe concussion and, although he has skated, isn’t symptom free and won’t play again this season.

Then, on Feb. 4, Blazers defenceman Austin Madaisky was spun around and checked into the boards by Chilliwack Bruins defenceman Brandon Manning. Madaisky escaped a concussion but was left with a non-displaced fracture of the seventh cervicular vertebrae. Manning served a seven-game suspension; Madaisky continues to wear an Aspen collar and will for another couple of weeks. If the injury continues to heal properly, he will avoid surgery and will be back on the ice over the summer.

“When there is a spinal injury people will say, ‘That's hockey,’ ” the mother wrote. “But that's not true. These are preventable injuries and we are not even trying to prevent them; in fact, the WHL profits off them by catering to the bizarre tastes of some people in the crowd.

“This is not acceptable. These are our children. We are all responsible to them — parents, reporters, coaches, etc.

“They trust us and we betray that trust. When the consequences of those concussions hit home there will be no cheering crowds.”

Mark Recchi is the Marathon man

JAMES MIRTLE
TORONTO— From Saturday's Globe and Mail
Published Friday, Mar. 18, 2011


There will be a record chase taking place on Saturday at the Air Canada Centre as the Toronto Maple Leafs play host to the Boston Bruins, although the man at the centre of the pursuit isn’t certain where he is or what number he’s headed for.

All Mark Recchi knows is that the more games he plays, the more text messages he gets from friends around the league with kudos for hitting yet another milestone.

The 43-year-old Bruin winger’s latest feat was moving into fifth in NHL games played, passing Dave Andreychuk on Tuesday with his 1,640 regular-season game.

His phone started buzzing soon after he got off the ice.

“My buddies text me all the time, ‘you’re about to catch this guy, in this or goals or whatever,’” Recchi said. “I have no idea. But friends keep me in the loop.

“My Dad actually told me last night how many it is to pass Chelios.”

Chelios being Chris Chelios, the grizzled defenceman who finally retired last summer at age 48, setting several longevity records of his own along the way.

Saturday’s game will leave Recchi only nine games back of Chelios’s games-played mark, one he will pass by the end of the season, barring injury.

And while he won’t say it outright, Recchi appears to have every intention of continuing to play beyond this season, perhaps even long enough to challenge Hall of Famer Gordie Howe’s NHL record of 1,767 games played.

Not bad for a fourth-round pick many felt was too small to play in the NHL when he was drafted – at age 20 – by the Pittsburgh Penguins 23 years ago.

“It’s been great,” Recchi said. “More than I could ever imagine, really.”

Recchi’s teammates, past and present, all marvel that he’s going strong, still rarely missing a game – his last long-term injury was in 2000 – and playing 16 minutes a night with one of the better teams in the league.

“Before I played with him, you always knew he was one of the great players, but you thought he was getting a little old,” said Tampa Bay Lightning star Steven Stamkos.

“Then you play with him and see how hard he works and how much he loves the game. He’s still going 100 miles an hour out there, still competing and he’s still got that fiery edge that he’s always had. That’s what’s keeping him young and why he’s playing so well.”

Hearing Recchi’s name, Stamkos’s teammate Ryan Malone’s face lit up, and he started to tell his own story of idolizing The Wrecking Ball growing up in Pittsburgh.

“I used his sticks growing up, when I was 13, 14 and they were winning the Cups,” Malone said. “Then I got a chance to play with him, really got to see what a great hockey player he is and what a great person.”

With 575 goals, 954 assists and 1,529 points – 19th, 13th and 13th in league history – Recchi is approaching more than just games played milestones. He passed Mike Bossy’s goals mark last month and sits two points behind Paul Coffey for 12th in career scoring.

While Recchi’s contract is up at the end of the season and no talks have yet been held with the Bruins, he has emerged as a mentor to rookie Tyler Seguin – just as he did with Stamkos and Jordan Staal in previous stops – and clearly enjoys that role.

Feeling old, meanwhile, hasn’t been a problem.

“I don’t really feel any different,” Recchi said. “I act like I’m 25.”

(He gives away his age in a recent profile in Sports Illustrated, however: “All these guys play Nintendos, Facebooks and Twitters,” he said of his younger teammates. “I have no idea and I don’t plan on having any idea.”)

As for what’s next, Recchi isn’t telling, other than to reveal that he would be willing to play a third- or fourth-line role down the line, as long as he feels part of a team’s success.

With only 125 games for him to catch Howe, several of Recchi’s peers said this week that the career games played record would be a fitting cap to his career.

“I hope he can keep playing,” Malone said. “Just to see him, not only to last so long, but to have an impact on the game every night, to play such a big role on that team is as impressive as anything else.

“Now that he’s lasted so long and been so consistent, he should be singled out as one of the top players to play.”

Darcy Regier’s goal is to eliminate concussions in hockey

ROY MacGREGOR
BOCA RATON, FLA.— From Saturday's Globe and Mail
Published Friday, Mar. 18, 2011



They call him Rain Man.

The reference is to the 1988 Dustin Hoffman-Tom Cruise movie and the character Raymond, who could tell you how much snow fell on a January day 20 years ago or could recite the telephone number of a person he just met, all thanks to studying the telephone book each night.

The tag comes courtesy of National Hockey League senior vice-president Colin Campbell. The 29 other league general managers think it’s funny, and Darcy Regier, general manager of the Buffalo Sabres since 1997, doesn’t mind at all.

When it comes to concussion talk, Regier is hockey’s equivalent of Raymond, who liked to dare people to drop a box of matches on the floor so he could instantly calculate how many spilled.

“I don’t have an accounting background,” the 54-year-old former defenceman says on a sunny day as the NHL wrapped up three days of talks on the head injuries that have plagued the league this winter. “But if I’m trying to figure something out and I don’t have a context for it, I usually end up gravitating toward numbers.”

The NHL is closing in on 100 concussions this year, almost all of them caused by the collision of two players.

“We average probably 45 hits in an NHL game,” Regier calculates as he talks. “And there’s 1,230 games in a season, so that makes up somewhere in the range of 50,000 hits.”

Regier is the NHL’s leading dove, one of three general managers who speak openly of banning all hits to the head (the others are the Pittsburgh Penguins’ Ray Shero and Carolina Hurricanes’ Jim Rutherford). Regier is also one of a larger group who argued, successfully, for the steps taken so far: last year’s Rule 48, which banned blindside hits, and this year’s decision to have a doctor rather than a trainer determine the seriousness of a hit to the head. They also led the push for this week’s decision to begin calling more boarding and charging penalties next season.

“For me,” Regier says, “the goal is to eliminate concussions. I could say, ‘Reduce those 100 to 20, or to 10,’ but the goal should be to eliminate entirely. I think ultimately we have to take a 360 approach [full protection from all sides] to protect the head.

“So, in a perfect world, I would like to be able to go in and just pull out those 100 concussions from the 50,000 hits and say, ‘Okay, now we’re at 49,900 hits and we haven’t changed the game. You’re missing 100 hits and we have eliminated all the concussions, and we didn’t hurt the game.’”

He knows, however, that this is dreaming.

“It’s not practical,” Regier says. “It’s not possible.”

There will always be accidental injuries. Players run into their own teammates. Players fall and strike their heads on the ice. Fighting remains a part of the game despite arguments in favour of banning it.

“That probably means we’re not getting to zero,” Regier says. But that is not to say that the goal of elimination is lost.

“The question is, to what extent can we manage it?” he says. “By this I mean where are most of these hits happening? Where on the ice? Is it close to the boards? Is it a result of charging? Is it a result of the [back-of-the-net] trapezoid, meaning that the goalies don’t come out to play pucks any more? Is it a result of having taken the centre line out?”

He saw, as lately all have noted, how the game changed after new rules were implemented following the 2004-05 lockout. By calling obstruction, the game sped up, which led to more violent collisions, which led to more concussions.

“I’ve been around long enough,” Regier says, “to know that if we don’t do the work and the studying, when we make changes, you might get lucky enough to hit that which you’ve tried to change – you might. But you can be guaranteed that there will be a lot of side effects, or unintended, unexpected consequences. So, for me it becomes really important that someone has to do a lot of work.”

Regier’s passion for studying cause and effect comes from personal experience. The native of Swift Current, Sask., suffered his first concussion as a junior playing for Prince Albert when he lost a fight in Regina and found himself sitting in the penalty box without the slightest notion of where he was. The coach sent Regier and backup goaltender Roland Boutin to the dressing room, where Boutin kept asking Regier where he was and Regier couldn’t answer. “I can remember sitting there guessing,” Regier says. “I was certainly conscious, but I had no idea where I was. And Rollie thought that was the funniest thing. He would repeat the question, ‘Do you know where you are?’ and I kept guessing. They had a lot of fun with it.

“Next day I was back at practice.”

That, of course, was standard treatment for concussion in those days: laugh it off, shake it off.

Regier turned professional and bounced around the minor leagues for years as part of the New York Islanders’ organization when the Islanders were a dynasty. He appeared in a handful of NHL games. When he joined management – first with the Islanders and, in 1997, becoming general manager of the Sabres – he had first-hand experiences with two of the game’s best-known concussion situations. First was with the Islanders, when Brett Lindros, younger brother of Eric, was forced to retire at 20 after a series of concussions.

“It was scary,” Regier says.

In the second instance, he traded Pat LaFontaine to the New York Rangers from Buffalo when the Sabres’ medical staff recommended that the star player should call it a career after so many concussions and LaFontaine believed he could still play. He went to New York but soon was forced to call it quits.

The concussion that really brought it all home for Regier, however, had nothing to do with professional hockey, but was a blow that passed by all but unnoticed in pee wee hockey. Regier’s son Jarrett was excelling in both tennis and hockey until, seven years ago, it all changed.

“He was very competitive,” Regier says of his third and youngest child. “And one day I noticed he wasn’t competing. He was small and ended up playing against bigger kids. His response when I was trying to understand why he had lost his competitiveness was ‘Dad, I don’t ever want to feel like that again.’ It was a concussion he was dealing with.

“As a parent you immediately move to ‘Wait a minute, is this worth it?’ In his case, hockey was his secondary sport, not his primary sport. His primary sport was tennis. At that point I started really to try to understand how badly he wanted to play hockey, because in my own mind I didn’t think it was going to be worth him dealing with that.”

Jarrett dropped out of hockey and is, today at 18, a promising young tennis player. Since that moment, Regier has tried to read everything he can on concussions and their aftermath.

“I had no idea of the magnitude,” he says.

He also believes that the hockey world, in particular the NHL, has no true sense of the overall effect of increased concussion awareness and the tsunami of public opinion that has risen up in recent weeks.

“We’re in a world now where people are voicing their opinions,” he says. “People recognize that they have a voice and they’re taking the responsibility for that voice. It might not all be rational, it might not all be objective, but the one-person one-vote thing has become a lot more real than it used to be.

“So I wonder what that means for things like our sport? Does it more strongly connect our society with our sport, and our responsibility back to it, however that might be interpreted?”

While he did not get what he had hoped for in this week’s meetings, he remains convinced that at some point the NHL will move to penalize all hits to the head, accidental or not.

“I’ve seen a shift in general managers over the years,” he says, “which I think is to try to understand more, to be more collaborative in nature, to be less confrontational and not to take a stand on a line in the sand.”

In discussions with hockey people at the junior ranks, he says there is a growing sense that this ever-flowing mass of information and opinion is having an impact. Parents are telling the traditionally physical junior hockey world that, “If you’re not going to look after the well-being of the players, their fathers, and probably to a greater extent their mothers, are going to have them go and play in an equally competitive and safer environment.” It could mean college hockey, it could mean another sport.

Regier says he and many other NHL leaders are acutely aware of their responsibility to the game as awareness concerning head injuries grows and public opinion shifts. It affects his everyday job.

“It’s a huge deal,” he says. “It is very big and it impacts a lot of areas. And that’s why it’s critical that we spend a lot of time on it and pay a lot of attention to it. And get it right.

“We need to get the concussion right and get the care right and get the player back playing.

“First of all, though, there should be no concussion if it can be prevented.”

Tom,

Thanks for posting the Mosston Spectrum. I have read about it before, but it is a good one to put on here. Hopefully coaches can see where they are at and try to "move to a lower level" - away from COMMAND!

So coaches, when you played, where would you put your coaches' style on this scale? How much of an influence does that have on your style?

For me, I had terrible coaches in midget and junior; they were all Command style (but with limited knowledge, poor communication skills, demonstrating favoritism (thereby losing my respect), and poor role models.) So in hindsight, it was actually good for me to endure this. Although this killed my love to play the game, it made me more determined to 'be a better coach than those dummies I played for' and I started to embrace different styles. Today I flex between styles that are appropriate for the situation and level. I do try to move my players toward becoming independent thinkers... so that is towards the DIVERGENT part of the scale.

THN.com Blog: Max Domi situation highlights issues surrounding freedom of young Canadian players

Ken Campbell 2011-03-21


Is Tie Domi’s recent announcement that his talented son, Max, intends to pursue the college hockey route in the United States a genuine intention or an attempt to have him drafted by the Ontario League team of his choice? With the OHL Cup – which is basically the all-Ontario minor midget championship – on the horizon this week, we’ll likely find out soon. But either way, kudos for Domi and his son for doing it.

As reported by Steve Simmons in The Toronto Sun on Sunday, Domi announced his 15-year-old son Max would eschew the OHL in order to play U.S. college hockey and next season he will bide his time in the United States League while he fast-tracks his way through high school in time to be eligible to play college hockey in 2012-13. Aside from being a very talented player, Max Domi is an outstanding student and should have his high school diploma in one year.

But that’s where this all gets very, very murky. First of all, Domi would not be the first player in history to tell all OHL teams he has chosen the college route. Hundreds of players over the years have told the OHL to stay away from them, which, in some cases, is basically code for telling the OHL they want to choose where they play.

And why not? If you’re a talented teenager and OHL owners are going to make money off your back, why not dictate the terms of your sentence? These kids ride buses all over the province, sometimes miss school and get paid less than minimum wage, so why would a talented player with options not use his leverage to his own benefit?

Secondly, Hockey Canada and USA Hockey have an agreement that borders on the obscene when it comes to restricting the rights of young people. Fearful it will lose its best prospects to college hockey, the Canadian League has convinced Hockey Canada to prohibit any 16-year-old Canadian player, in conjunction with USA Hockey, from playing in the USHL unless they appeal to the National Appeals Committee and demonstrate "special circumstances" or move there with a parent. What makes it so obscene is the CHL opens its arms to American-born 16-year-olds and has no problem with doing it, but insists on making it a one-way street.

Sure, it saves the best young players for the Canadian junior system and keeps them away from the clutches of the U.S. college system, largely because the CHL has access to the players at an age when American universities aren’t even allowed to contact them. But where exactly are the best interests of the player being served here? Anyone?

But Domi can, and likely will, get around this rule. The only other way a Canadian player can play in the USHL as a 16-year-old without appealing is for him to take up residence in the United States, either moving there with a parent or by residing with someone who is willing to assume guardianship of him.

Either should be doable for the Domi family. Either he or Max’s mother, Leanne, could move to a USHL city for a year and rent an apartment. That’s precisely what former NHLer Dave Gagner did so his son, current Edmonton Oiler center Sam, could play for the Sioux City Musketeers in 2005-06. Gagner moved his entire business to Minnesota and took up residence so Sam could play in the USHL legally. And if Domi needed to legitimize his move by finding employment in the U.S., there’s little doubt his good friend, Pittsburgh Penguins owner Mario Lemieux, would be able to oblige.

Then again, as we said earlier, all this might simply be posturing to have Domi land in a favorable situation, such as, say, the Kitchener Rangers. There is absolutely no doubt that despite the warning not to take him, an OHL team will draft Max Domi. One might even draft him in the first round, since the OHL now has a little-known rule that stipulates if your first round pick does not report, you get another choice immediately after your first round pick in the following year’s draft.

It all seems rather insidious, doesn’t it? A teenager should have the right to play where he wants.