The Hockey PDOcast - Episode 63: Your Best Player Isn't The Problem

Episode Date: February 19, 2016

A day after PK Subban soaked up all of the blame for a Canadiens loss simply because he tried to do what they pay him for, we ask the following questions: Why are people in various levels of hockey, whether it's fans, analysts, or coaches, still so conservative and risk averse? Why does the best player always get singled out as the one whose play needs to be questioned first when things go wrong for the team? Why is there still such a giant divide between perception and reality when it comes to what the defense position entails in 2016? *Every episode of this podcast is available on iTunes, Soundcloud, and can also be streamed from our website. Make sure to not only subscribe so that you don’t miss out on any new shows as they’re released, but also take a minute to leave us a glowing review. *This episode is brought to you by Freshbooks, an online accounting service designed to save time and help avoid all of the stresses that come with running a small business. They’re currently offering a free 30-day trial to listeners of our show at Freshbooks.com/PDOcast (just remember to enter “Hockey PDOcast” in the ‘How You Heard About Us’ section). Thanks for listening! See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices If you'd like to gain access to the two extra shows we're doing each week this season, you can subscribe to our Patreon page here: www.patreon.com/thehockeypdocast/membership If you'd like to participate in the conversation and join the community we're building over on Discord, you can do so by signing up for the Hockey PDOcast's server here: https://discord.gg/a2QGRpJc84 The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the hosts and guests and do not necessarily reflect the position of Rogers Media Inc. or any affiliate.

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You can try your hand at it with a 30-day trial that's being offered at freshbooks.com slash pediocast. Just make sure to enter that the hockey pdocast sent you. That's freshbooks.com slash pdiocast. Regressing to the mean since 2015, it's the hockey pdioch with your host, Travis Yost and Dimitri Filipovich. Welcome to the hockey pdiochast. My name is Indyrivedovovic and joining me as my co-host, Travis Yost.

Travis, what's going on, man? I am hanging in there. Do you want to tell everyone what your plans are for tonight and why we're recording earlier than usual? I don't know, man. I'm going to have a social life. I'm going to go hang out with friends. But let me just check the schedule here.

There's plenty of late-night hockey games on. Are you going to watch one of those? No. I think the Canucks are on, so I'm definitely not watching that. You got Stars Coyotes? Oh, I could actually be like a 7-6 game. Yeah, that could be fun. Huh.

I might watch that tomorrow morning. You know what? The thing is, I think people don't realize all, like, watch the games. Jokes aside, I think I watch, like, a good 10 games today, kind of going back and watching old ones. So I think I'm all burnt out for the day. So now you reward yourself with clips first. Yes, yes. I'm going to relax a little bit and watch an inferior sport.

There's at least three people who remind me daily on this thing that I remember it's the NBA at least once every hockey podcast. And I am now making it a point to keep it alive. Now we're good. Now let's go. Yeah, we've filled our quota. I feel like this is going to be a pretty, I don't know if angry is the right way, but it's going to be a lively show. There's a few things that I know I personally want to kind of rant about and I'm sure you're going to jump in on the fun as well. So I mean, I'm sure listeners won't complain because they seem to be kind of in favor of whenever we occasionally

league get fired up about something. Yeah, I don't know. It's not manufactured though. So I'm actually, I'm kind of curious because you kind of gave a vague lead into this. You mentioned, you messaged me on Twitter and said, I'm just kind of pissed off today or something to that effect. So I'm curious. I'm curious what it's ruffles your feathers today.

Well, listen, it's all relative. I mean, I'm not going to be as pissed off per se as I was last time when you pooed me saying Andrew Ladd to Washington would be an under the radar move and then following it up by trying to sneak in Eric Stahl going anywhere. The next day on Sportsnet, they're talking about Eric Stahl's train. I'm like, oh, God. Very under the radar, of course. No, okay, something that bugged me last night, and we're recording this on a Thursday evening,

so this was Wednesday. It was just the whole thing. Did you watch the Habs game against the abs? Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, for those that didn't see it, quickly summarize it, basically is a tie game with like two minutes left. P.K. Sue Ben, has the puck in the offensive zone.

and he tries to make a play and kind of skates towards open ice, and he seems to lose an edge and falls, and Greg Rehnko picks up the puck and goes the other way, and the Ave score a goal and win it. And, of course, afterwards, Michelle Tarian benches him, of course, when they have the extra attacker in those final dying seconds, and then afterwards calls PKK you Ben selfish and essentially just kind of pins all the blame on him for the loss,

which is hilarious to me. And then, of course, the guys on Sportsnet come on, and they have this segment immediately talking about how PKK Sub-Ben needs to make the right conservative play by just dumping the puck deep in the zone and kind of retreating on D and making sure the habs get at least that one point. And I'm just like, why do we feel the need to do this thing every time someone makes a mistake? Like I just like, I just don't get it. Well, you have to, in fairness to everyone criticizing P.K. Stuban here, you have to understand he, the reason why he's like a career 55% on ice goal player is because he plays extremely conservative and he never takes gambles. and he just pretty much does everything as conservatively and simple as possible.

Actually, that's not true at all. He has gotten to that level by playing that ultra freewheeling. I know I'm the best player on the ice. I am going to take a gamble in every single zone because I know more often than not it's going to pay off. And yes, there are going to be times when my team is victimized by maybe an aggressive pinch or an aggressive move in the defensive zone to attack a puck carrier that I think I can get to. But for the most part, over long samples and hundreds and hundreds of games, P.K. Suban is going to add an unbelievable number of wins into your standings. This is what he does. This is why he's paid so much money. He is, without a doubt, the best player, the most valuable player the Canadians have, at least fit in the skater level.

Now, you can make the argument that Carrie Price might have more value. But my point is this, P.K. Subban is, driving that bus, right? Like they win because of him. They don't lose because of him. And this is the thing that it kills me because it's a P.K. Suban thing. It's an Eric Carlson thing. It's a any elite player, Taylor Hall thing, any elite player who's on a bad team, and usually that bad team is by way of a bad head coach and or a bad front office, that player is immediately, he's the one that needs to change his game. And then you look at his numbers and you're like, man, if they had 12 of him, they would never lose a game. But it's, you know, it's not, it's not the third or fourth liners fault. It's actually Taylor Hall, who's, uh, who needs to play more conservatively and not,

not score 35 goals a season. Well, it's always weird when, yeah, people blame the best player on a bad team for not being good enough rather than kind of looking at all the other guys who aren't as good as that player and just kind of letting them skate by just maybe because they're not like necessarily as physically talented or whatever, or maybe the expectations, Right? And then they're just like, you kind of know what you're getting from those guys and you're, you settled for it and you kind of expect this greater standard from the best player. And whenever the team fails, it's all on him. And it just seems like such a weird way to approach it considering there's 18 guys and then the goalie. So it just makes no sense. Well, the thing that makes sense is Michelle Tarian is a terrible hockey coach, which he's not going to last, despite whatever Mark Bergevan says about him being secure. And I have a quiet bet with Andrew Berkshire now that he's convinced that Terrian will start the season next year behind the bench. And I would be unbelievably surprised if that happened.

I think his days are absolutely near. And I'm actually curious where his next job comes, right? because anyone, if John Tortorella can get a new job, like yet, Michelle Therian, right? Like, clearly he was just sandbags by the loss of a goaltender. This is a guy who is so talented and so good at what he does. Any team would behoove themselves to hire Michelle Tarian. But no, actually, I'm kidding. He's terrible.

There's no reason to apportion any of the blame for this season other than Michelle Tarian's a pretty abysmal head coach. and the depth of this team is being exposed in the worst possible way. Now, I don't think they're in Montreal as nearly as bad a team as they've shown. I think you can even make the argument that they're still the best Canadian team. And either them or Winnipeg, it's one of them too. And yet at the same time, here we are talking about is P.K. Sue Bant to blame for the game. Come on.

I think anyone that's listened to the show in the past knows that all this stuff about Terry and the Habs, right? Like, we've discussed it. But I think the overarching thing, like the reason why we, we are talking about Suban in this instance is because this stuff sort of just seems to happen all the time, all this post-talk analysis where people latch on to one glaring mistake an ultra-skilled guy makes as kind of just sweeping under the rug the million other good, subtle, productive things he does along the way and kind of just like focusing on that one one thing, right? And you hear with Carlson all the time, Suban, of course. I mean, even, I mean, you've seen this character assassination of Keith Yandel in the New York media this year.

and it just like go on down the line and it seems like people don't necessarily have a great grasp of what effective defensemen in 2015, 2016 actually are. Like I feel like the conversations we're having in hockey this year compared to years past are much more sophisticated and kind of have come a long way. But at the same time, whenever we discuss defensemen and like this Norris discussion,

it seems like the divide between perception and reality is pretty much as enormous as it's ever been. I did like the, did you see the quote today from Suban about why people kind of nitpick his personality when he looks around the league and guys like Bergeron and Taves and then you have guys like, you know, Ben and Sagan. And there's like this wide ranging scale of really reserved to really, you know, flamboyant for a lack of better word. And none of those guys seem to earn criticism. And I think Suban was almost like kind of like surprised that there's been so much. criticism, I guess, levied towards him regarding his personality and really just, I guess, general mannerisms. And I don't know why he's surprised by this at all, right? There's two ways to

be criticized in the NHL. One, are you a good player on a bad team? Two, are you not a white Canadian male? And if you qualify for both of those, you will be criticized far more than, one, a good player on a good team, or two, a good player on a good team who is also a a white Canadian male. I mean, that's, that's like the baseline for every single thing. If you, if you looked at every single player and whether or not he's been criticized, overly criticized, you can probably bend him into one of those two categories. I think you can stretch that to North American rather than just Canadian. Like, I feel like American guys themselves also get a pass in that regard.

I actually, there's probably some truth to that, although I do feel that I'm overly criticized on this podcast relative to you. And I can only attribute it to my, to my Americanism. No, I think that's probably fair. North American, white North American. There you go. Why do you think like the, okay, I completely agree with what you said, but I think there's, you know, other guys that fit into that bucket that I was saying of kind of skilled playmaking defensemen that seem to just get like consistently dragged, dragged over the calls by people for no apparent reason when they make mistakes. And I don't know, do you think

it just like kind of speaks to human nature, I guess, like just like being overly conservative to a fault, like risk aversion where you know, you watch a guy like Dan Gerardi, for example, who never tries to do anything. So he just has like, he's basically just bleeding you dry, like death by a thousand cuts, just consistently doing all these little things that are killing you, but never anything that's so overtly obvious that you can like latch onto that one thing. A prominent hockey person three years ago said Dan Girardi was his Norris pick. I mean, this is, do you need?

Do you need a more smoking gun than this, than this moment? I mean, this is, this is very a real thing. The other part of it is, I, again, let's bring back to P.K. Suban for a second. Pull out every thing that we've even talked about and just look at the facts. P.K. Suban is probably the second best defenseman in the world. He kind of has fluctuated in his career back and forth. There are Carlson.

This year, he's the clear number two in both good and bad ways, right? Like, he's so far ahead of everyone else. But he's definitively in that number two spot. And there's no way that you can make an argument that P.K. Subbin is in any way, shape, or form responsible for really anything that's happened in Montreal this year. He's had a great year. The team has been, you know, just more or less submarine around him. But for the most part, his numbers are absolutely mint golden by any way you stretch him or turn him. And yet, here we are at the end of February. And people are blaming him for losses. And this is not the first time. I believe this has happened in the game against Columbus back about a month ago. again, there's no, there's no quantitative or qualitative justification to blame P.K. Subban, in any manner beyond, I just kind of don't like this guy. And if that's the case, fill your boots with that kind of with that kind of rationale. But it's just, it's so patently obvious what it actually is. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Well, I think, I feel a little bit better now that we've kind of talked that out.

I don't know. I was like, just, it was just grading me all last night and early this morning, just seeing some of the dialogue people are having about it, and I think we kind of settle that. Let's take a quick little break here to hear from our sponsor, and we'll discuss other fun stuff like concussions after the break. As you surely heard of the top, sponsoring today's show is FreshBooks, an online service that's designed to help make life easier

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in the how you heard about a section. And after that, you can immediately start making your life easier today. All right. So, of course, the other big news in the NHL this week, I feel like, is the breaking news that Dennis Wyman's appeal was not reduced by of course, neutral arbitrator, Gary Bettman.

I feel it's amazing to me the people were acting like that was news, because there was approximately a 0.00% chance that there was ever going to be any sort of reduction, at least in this phase of the arbitration, right? Like, now they're actually going to a neutral party and we'll see what happens. But isn't it the weird thing that he's already sat out like seven or eight games? And what if the neutral arbitrator was like, actually, I think this was only like a five or six game suspension? Like, what would happen then? Is, are we just like, the NHL is just assuming that it has to be over like 10 games or something? Like, I don't know.

Well, I saw Brian Burke reacted a little bit about that, huh? Yeah. Like, that was, that was, so again, the NHL is very rank and file. So it's always interesting to me when someone organizationally lashes out a bit at the NHL. And I didn't actually catch anything more than the snippet that Burke had mentioned. But my understanding was he was just completely displeased with how long it took. Yeah.

Yeah. It's taken weeks, right? Like, I don't know. It just seems to make no sense that this guy's not playing while they're trying to sort this out and they're acting as if there's still a possibility that he could have that suspension reduced? Like, I don't know, just like it seems silly. It seems like anyone that actually believes anything's going to come with this is kind of not really reading between the lines. So the interesting thing, and I actually tweeted about this yesterday, but I'm sure a lot of people

did not catch it and I'll mention it again. By far the most, and again, we actually talked about the Wyman situation when it happened. Like, as soon as you, As soon as he even remotely mentioned that, oh, he may have been concussed, and then we heard the diagnosis, and then we heard, oh, Dennis Wyven's actually going to use a concussion defense, immediately said no longer about Dennis Wyman, not even one Iota about Dennis Wyden. This is far more reaching now that he is talking or entering a concussion defense because of the ongoing concussion litigation and how critical really this is going to be in maybe being future evidence in that case. But the thing I found most curious of all was, If you read through the ruling, Gary Bettman references, you know, this infamous text message that Dennis Watteman submitted. And the text message was not, I would be hard press to really call it material to the instant matter. But he did, he did mention in some regards that he thought that this was being driven or the discussion to suspend him was being driven by alternative means. media fanning the flames, fans fanning the flames, and so on and so forth. So my understanding, and I actually know this to be true, and I even think it's been reiterated

and confirmed by a couple of different people, that the league, when they go through the mental discipline process, should they want to, they can go out and acquire text messages or data or information from a player cell phone, and I understand that they've done this in the past. but I noticed when I was reading through it the first time that I was like man this is new I've really never seen the NHL explicitly introduce a specific text message and it wasn't again I can't emphasize enough that text message was not a smoking gun in any way and nor did Gary Betman introduce it as a smoking gun in any way he kind of offhand and noted as oh and further to my point Dennis Wydenman didn't seem uh didn't seem all that uh or he seemed disingenuous or he didn't seem that upset with actually how the situation played out. He said it troubled him.

Yeah, yeah, right. So again, he could have suspended him without including that. The impact of his ruling would have been the same. His legitimization would have been exactly the same, but he included it. And he made it a point. And I think this is such an important takeaway because as some people know, but not everyone, a batch of emails are set to be released from Colin Campbell and a number of other people that are, for lack of a better word, unflattering.

And you can put quotes around unflattering, actually. They are crude. They're unflattering. They are in relation to the ongoing concussion litigation. And they were sent over X period, right? So you have all these emails that the NHL has worked feverishly to keep or dacted and protected in private from the public eye. And they lost on that. These are going to be released. You can kind of catch snippets of it, but you know, you've got your stock Colin Campbell

calling trainers idiots and as they actually offer and render medical opinions. And this is, the point I'm trying to get to is this. The NHL knows that there is going to be a situation in the immediate future where they're going to look very bad because they're, agents, their representatives, conducted business in some way that is going to look, I can't think of the best word, trivial dismissive is probably a better word, of the seriousness of the ongoing concussion litigation and actual head trauma and so on and so forth. And I think the NHL wanted to make it a point that, hey, they wanted to get out in front and say, hey, this is a great chance to show you that we're not the bad guys. This is a two-way street. And this is how the players act. And this is a

really important takeaway because for as long as this is going to go on, the NHL is going to try and apportion as much blame as humanly possible on the players. Like, can maximize their responsibility, minimize the league's responsibility for concussion handling, concussion protocol. And I think they want to show that, you know, they're going to try and get out in front of this and try and paint the player or players with a bad brush because they know what's coming down the road. And I just, I found that such an important takeaway because that is coming.

and I don't know if anyone really connected the dots or if a lot of people connected the dots, but I thought that was unbelievably eyebrow raising. Well, and I think eyebrow raising and also kind of ironic that you drop the word, they're dismissive, and it's like they're trying to get ahead of it by being even more dismissive now, like in the present. Like just like the entire process of how they've handled this has just reeked of being dismissive and negligent in my mind. And those are the same things that they're, you know, being taken to court and by the players.

All of it is just so silly to me. So ultimately the interesting thing with Wydenman, if there's anything even interesting remaining about this, is now it's going to go to an independent arbitrator or an independent third party, I should say, and he's going to review the case. And I'm kind of curious how his ruling applies, but again, I always find these independent rulings,

at least as they are mechanized through the collective bargaining agreement, to be a bit curious because it's like the commissioner who is a lawyer sets the tone of of how his, how he perceives the matter to be, right? Like this is Gary Bettman's professional opinion of what's actually went on in this situation. And this is kind of like the same, the reason why you'll have convictions in criminal court and they'll go through appeals and the uphold rate in the appeals court is so brazenly high. And it's, you'll have these situations where as much as, you know, appeal courts or, or independent parties are supposed to just rely on the facts, a lot of the times, whether they want to admit it or not, there is an underlying bias that you know the prior

results and you know what, uh, what has undercut you, uh, in these six months or a year or two years before your time is to rule. And I, I always found that just an interesting kind of back and forth between how, and this is not just exclusive to the NHL, but basically how a commissioner gets his hands on it before they send it out to someone. And this is a guy who is the agent of the of the entire league. And then he sends it off to some, you know, professor, college professor, who, you know, well trained, obviously very good at what he does. But I think it's a bit of a tricky thing to a wrangle, especially if you're a player looking for a real genuine appeal here. Yeah. Okay, well, let's spin it forward. You do you.

get a chance to finally watch the Rick West hit feature on Dan Lackature and Mike Paloosa recently? So I promised you I would watch it and I caught about three minutes of it and I was like, I'm going to watch the rest of it. And then I made it like five minutes through and that's about it. I caught up to the part where Gary Bettman spoke. Oh my God. That quote of him where he's like saying there's no medical link between any of this stuff is just like, okay there, Uncle Gary. So this is this is the same well that the NFL. went to before they settled their precaution litigation. It's, you

can't prove that they're, they're trying to hide behind the fact that there's no smoking gun conclusion between the two because science is still conflicting. And actually to some degree, again, not a doctor, don't want to offer any medical opinions because I just am not qualified

to do it in any way. But what they're trying to hide behind is basically, you can't substantially 100% prove it. Therefore, or you have to rule in our favor. And that's really what they're trying to box themselves in. Right.

Well, the reason I kind of wanted to talk about is because we had Eric Young on the podcast earlier in the week, and he's a professional wrestler. And I think he kind of said some stuff that may have caught people that listen to the show off guard a little bit because he seemed to kind of be backing the league and being, and he made the point of how he thinks that, like, if you talk to any of these players that are currently suing the league, that they would, you know, 10 out of 10 times do it again if they had the chance because they knew what they were signing up for and they got to live their dream of playing in NHL. And I think there's a little bit of merit to that in the sense that I do

get the feeling that at least most of these guys would, you know, do it all over again if they could because they did get to live that dream. But that's kind of missing the force for the trees here, right? Where no one's really arguing that. What we're arguing about is that the league was negligent in the way they handled things and they kind of hid information from them and that they sort of need to pay for that. So this is not an uncommon response, by the way. There are many players who kind of speak in the same or similar vein, which is, yeah, well, I knew there were risks, obviously, comma, I was okay with that because I was paid,

comma, therefore I played the league and did it, you know, played in the league and do it again. And it ignores the most important truth of what concussion litigation, not just in the We'll speak to the NHL, but in other sports and other realms as well. And that is the NHL in this matter knew or should have known far more than they did. And let's say they did have information because the plaintiffs have certainly dug around in discovery and have certainly a pine that the NHL was holding back some information regarding the dangers of head trauma and what it could pose to a player. to that end, if the NHL knew more information and did not share the dangers that were kind of bellied in that information with the players, that's the part of the concussion lawsuit.

That's literally the foundation of the entire lawsuit is that the NHL concealed this information from the players. And maybe not every player would have changed his mind about playing in the National Oxn League. but just as an extreme example, if the NHL had offered evidence that suicide rates were four times as likely across players or a professional athlete to experience repeated in blonde force head trauma, maybe there are some players. And you can't quantify what that number is, but there is some player or are some players. Well, if there's even a single player, like that. Correct, correct. And this is the big part of it, which, is, again, the NHL knew or should have known much more than they either led on or disclosed or investigated themselves, and that they kind of kept the players, for a lack of better phrasing, in the dark about this, right?

Like, that's kind of what it's about. And the players, I think it's a flawed perception for a player to say, well, you know, now we understand the risk. So now, you know, now everything's okay. But that doesn't really speak to the state of the environment where it was 20, 30 years ago, which is, you know, the guys are skating around without helmets, for Christ's sakes. I mean, this is exactly the type of stuff. Now, the NHL, to their credit,

has done stuff very recently to really, I guess, orchestrate a movement against this type, or at least mitigate a lot of this head trauma. But, I mean, like, to back to the player's point, fighting still exists in the NHL. They're ringing freaking rocky bells before some of these fights. I watch Nesson and they, as soon as the fight gets going, they put up the graphic on the screen of the tail of the table, the heights, weights, like, well, you know, hand dominance of the two players fighting.

And it's like, are we really still doing this in 2016? Yep. So the end, and the big reason why that's of primary concern is the, the, the, the, one of the main points that the NHLs tried to raise is that we don't condone fighting. For example, and I'm just using fighting as one example. I know people are going to say, oh, there's this, you know, open ice head checking. And that, yeah, that matters too. but at least it pertains to fighting. It's a great example, right?

Because you have situations where the NHL says, we don't condone fighting. You get a five-minute penalty for it. And meanwhile, these players are allowed back in the ice in the same game after they absolutely wail on each other. You have situations like Evander Cain a couple weeks ago where he's fighting the same player three times.

You're exposing a player to maybe 25 to 30 sub-concussive impacts on the head. And this is exactly the type of stuff that the players, the plaintiff's part of the suit, has repeatedly attacked, which is the NHL may not explicitly and condone everything. They certainly implicitly condone some of it, though. And look, the reality is the NHO is going to lose in this matter.

They're almost certainly going to settle out, I believe. And when it comes down to it, and this is one of the big changes that I have long championed, is game as conducts from fighting. I understand that fighting has slowly evolved out of the league. Like, fighting is very few and far between these days relative to where it was in years past. but I mean, even still right now, you're going to, you're going to get to a situation where fighting is an automatic game of scorn.

Because the NHL can't have that on their shoulders anymore. And look, they're on the hook right now. They are backing up. They know they're in trouble right now. And now it's kind of as much damage control as they can do. Right. And that's the thing, right? It's like you're not going to eliminate all concussions and all head trauma

because of the nature of the sport. Like there are going to be on ice collisions and there are going to be hits up against the boards occasionally. and it's just going to happen. It's a part of the game, but there's no real need to keep the fighting part of it. Like, it's not part of the game. So you can kind of remove that and at least limit some of the needless exposure. And I definitely agree that the game misconduct thing is going to happen in the next

handful of years, I'd say. Even like, it's progressively, if you look at all the numbers in terms of percentages of fights per game and how many guys have been fighting in the league, like, it's dropped pretty drastically from year to year for the past five or six years. so it's kind of organically being removed from the game. But I think that the NHL is going to have to need to take away the option from guys like forcefully to actually make drastic change. So tying this back as we wrap up here.

The other I thought important detail, not the actual upholding of the ruling because that was obviously irrelevant. But back to the widening thing for a second. Gary Bettman noted that one, the team, because he had to. I mean, this is a, and it was right in the statement of facts, part of it. He had to because the team and media had kind of boxed him into a situation where, I mean, these facts are undeniable at this point, is that he was ruled, Dennis Wyman was ruled with a concussion days later.

And despite him not really buying elements of that, of that medical opinion, he did note that this matter only dealt with whether Dennis Widman's concussion defense was legitimate. It did not, and he's explicitly noted. of this, it was not going to deal with the Calgary Flames failure to satisfy concussion protocol, which is a major, major flag in this situation, right? Because again, if you're a player and you have now stipulated to situations where we understand to some degree that we cannot make medical decisions after immediate head trauma. This is exactly why the concussion protocol exists. Pull players off the ice for 15 minutes. Render is concussion test. The idea is to get the best

diagnosis possible in a realistic environment in a realistic fashion. And the idea is to take the decision out of the player's hands, right? Like this is in college football. A guy's helmet pops off, even if he's totally fine, got to come off a play, right? That's a staple of college football now. Same thing with, like in the NFL, for example, you'll see a guy he's woozy on the sidelines. What is the first thing the trainer does? Takes away his helmet, right? Walks away, takes away his helmet. These are all like very quiet, underlying things that sports leagues and teams are doing now to take the decision out of the player's hand because they have, they more than well know that players who are humans, for that matter, I should say, can really not make the best calculated decisions here.

And that's, that's really important to Dennis Wyman's case because, remember, there's a whole discussion of, you didn't want to go through the protocol or something to that effect. And the point, what Gary Betman has to say is, look, Wydenman shouldn't be, he didn't say it. This was implied, but Wydenman shouldn't be in a position where he could make that decision. This is on the flames. And the other part I'm curious about here is now is what is what is Gary Betman going to do with the flames? Because I guarantee you there's going to be some very public orchestrated finding of the flames for not following the concussion protocol fully. They will make that as public as humanly possible because they want everyone to know they are working as aggressively as possible to mitigate concussion.

So rest assured, that will make its way to every media outlet in North America. But that was the other thing that I noted as a takeaway. and I want it to talk about a bit. Well, if there's one thing you can say about the NHLs, they definitely do their due diligence on dealing with concussions and making sure the protocol is put in place. Yeah, the theme of this podcast was sarcasm, it sounds like. So is there anything else you wanted to quickly touch on before we get out of here,

or do you think we're good? Well, we touched their bases, Michelle. Terrian's terrible. Well, I mean, I think, I think like the past two shows we did, we sort of, one was all west, another one was all east, and we sort of just, like, hit all the main storylines. I feel like anything else would just be, at least for now, it would be kind of repeating ourselves until there's some more trade rumors or, you know, injuries or something to actually kind of talk about

that's fresh. My favorite, my probably my favorite thing in the NHL right now is you have all these people working for teams who have practiced criminally civilly and they're kind of privy to the ongoing concussion litigation. And I mean, just kind of getting the feedback of or just reading some of the, the feedback from people who can talk about it versus the people who privately talk about it. And some of these people have practiced for years and years and years and years and years. The opinions are wide-ranging.

There is not a unilateral defense of the NHL, nor is there a unilateral defense of the players, for that matter. It's a very touchy, tricky subject, but I do feel like there are a handful of things that have really killed the NHL in this instance. one of the, and again, I don't want to keep bringing you back to fighting, but fighting is going to kill the NHL in this lawsuit, because whether they want to admit it or not, they do not condone fighting for a lack of better words. They'll marginally penalize a player and he will return and maybe fight the same person two or three times later down the road.

And it's, you can't say that they put their best foot forward in terms of mitigating head drama when they're doing stuff like that, not to mention all the facts. all the all the dumb gary betman quotes that he put out years ago that i guarantee he would like back pre-concussion litigation when he was saying that fighting was good for the game because of cool's temperatures and you know none of this stuff is medically backed or just even remotely anecdotally researched at the bare minimum it's it's just gary betman's opinions and as the as literally the commissioner of the sport like these are not things you want going to print and i remember even before anyway before concussion litigation was on anyone's radar i remember reading that question quote back in like, oh, 2010 or 2011. And I remember cutting it out, pacing on the Twitter, right when Twitter was first to the, you could post photos and videos. And I'm like, this is going to be a concussion loss in one day. This is so ridiculously dumb.

And it's such a massive subject. And I don't want to spend every waking podcast on it. But I think it is an important subject to tackle and talk about. Well, definitely is. But do we need to take away your headset and put you in the protocol? I asked you if there's anything else you wanted to talk about. and then you just went back and talked about concussions for another three minutes. Oh, let me tell you something about concussions.

Well, I'm glad we haven't discussed this yet, so let's get into this whole discussion debate. Let me tell you something. There are people in my life who would want me permanently in a protocol. Yeah. All right, well, we'll be back next week, and hopefully there will be some new stuff for us to kind of sink our teeth into. Sounds good, man. The HockeyPedioCast, online at HockeyPedioCast.com. Subscribe on iTunes, SoundCloud, or follow on Twitter at Dim Filipovich and at Travis Yost.