Grab bag: A moment in time

In the Friday Grab Bag:
- The NHL were the big winners in the concussion settlement. So why does it feel like we all lost?
- A new rule we need to see for penalty shot calls
- An obscure player with a knack for finding terrible teams
- The week's three comedy stars
- And a classic YouTube look back at the legitimately amazing 1987 Edmonton Oilers "Moment in Time" video

>> Read the full post at The Athletic

Podcast: Final destination

In this week's episode of Biscuits, the Vice Sports hockey podcast:

- Reacting to the first two games of the Stanley Cup final, which were honestly pretty great
- Braden Holtby's save
- Tom Wilson's non-suspension
- Evgeny Kuznetsov's injury
- The do's and don'ts of pregame ceremonies
- The NHL's very bad week of concussion news
- Plus Melnyk vs Alfredsson, book talk and lots more...

>> Stream it now:

>> Or, subscribe on iTunes.

How the concussion lawsuit could threaten the NHL's future

The NHL is having a rough few months. They just announced that they won’t be going to the Olympics, even though their fans and players want them to. They have franchises in trouble. Everybody seems to be complaining about the playoff format. Their new expansion team just got overshadowed by a bigger league. This year’s playoff race has turned into a bust, with basically all the spots wrapped up before the final weekend. And it’s already sounding like the next lockout is all but inevitable.

And believe it or not, none of that comes close to being the league’s biggest problem right now.

That’s because the league is facing a major threat in the form of a lawsuit over its handling of concussions. The slow-moving suit has been winding its way through the courts for a few years now, and there’s no immediate end in sight. But some recent developments have pushed it back onto the front page. And it hasn’t been a good look for the NHL.

So what exactly is this lawsuit, and what does it mean for the NHL?

It’s a complicated issue with a lot of moving parts, but at a high level, this is about former NHL players who say they suffered concussions during their playing days, whether the league and its teams did enough to ensure player safety at the time, and what sort of responsibility (if any) the league should have to those players today.

Much of this resolves around a degenerative disease called chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE. Most experts agree that CTE is related to a history of concussions and brain injuries, and can lead to all sorts of symptoms late in life, including dementia, aggression, depression and suicidal thoughts. Some of the stories of former athletes living with symptoms are gut-wrenching.

A growing list of former NHL players are suing the league, claiming that they suffered concussions during their careers – in some cases, multiple untreated concussions. Some players claim they’re already experiencing CTE-like problems, while others are concerned that they’ll face them in the future. The list began with 10 players filing suit in 2010; that list quickly grew to over a hundred. The case is now a class action suit, meaning it could include any ex-player who was suffering from concussion-related problems.

As often happens, this case has moved slowly. But we recently found out that a judge told the parties last year that she wants the case to go to trial in 2017, in some form or another.

>> Read the full post at The Guardian

The NHL's concussion lawsuit is here. Now what?

On Monday afternoon, this week in the NHL was shaping up to be an uneventful one, maybe even bordering on dull. Four hundred words later, everything had gone to hell.

That's how long it took for this announcement from a California-based law firm, helpfully accompanied by a delightfully subtle stock photo, to deliver the news: The long-awaited NHL concussion lawsuit has finally arrived. Buckle up; things are probably about to get bumpy.

Here's a look at the suit and what it may mean.

What exactly just happened?

On Monday, 10 former NHL players filed a class-action lawsuit against the NHL in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. The 47-page suit, which can be read in its entirety here, alleges that the league knew (or should have known) about the dangers posed by concussions and failed to do enough to reduce the risk of head injuries and educate players about the issue.

The suit seeks rule changes, medical care for former players, and the "full measure of damages allowed under applicable law." There's no dollar value attached to that yet, but in theory it could be very high, well into the hundreds of millions.

Is this basically the NHL's version of the recent NFL suit?

It could be, though we're not there yet.

There are certainly similarities between the NHL's situation and the recent NFL case. Both leagues have been plagued by player concussions, both have made recent rule changes to try to reduce them, and both have struggled with the question of how to make the games safer without rendering the sport unrecognizable to fans. For whatever it's worth, attorney Mel Owens, who is involved in the NHL suit, is a former NFL linebacker.

Once the NFL settled its suit for $765 million in August, the sports world wondered which league would be next, and the NHL seemed like a natural candidate. Now, we appear to be starting down that path.

So everyone already knew this was going to happen?

The specifics of this particular suit weren't known until Monday. But once the NFL litigation began, the clock was ticking on the NHL to face something similar. It has long been seen as inevitable that the league was going to be hit with a massive class-action suit over concussions at some point.

The question was when, and from whom it would come. Now that we have a starting point, other suits will probably follow, maybe quickly.

>> Read the full post on Grantland