Ken Dryden calls out Gary Bettman and the NHL over concussion protocol

With the NHL and the NHLPA agreeing earlier this week to extend the current collective bargaining agreement (CBA) until 2022, the usual criticism of NHL commissioner Gary Bettman has subsided. 

Well… leave it to former Montreal Canadiens netminder Ken Dryden to kick things back up a notch. In a recent column for the Toronto Sun, Dryden personally calls out the NHL and commissioner Bettman for their lack of action on concussions and brain injuries, despite a mountain of evidence that proves the league’s culpability. 

For the full article, click just below, or check out some selected excerpts from the article even further below: 

The problem of brain injuries in sports is now beyond doubt. The public knows it. Scientists don’t have the technology to see the evidence of it in living brains, but they and everyone can see it in all the other evidence around them — in memory loss, depression, loss of cognitive function, mood swings, anger and abuse. It is unmissable, undeniable, for anyone not wanting to miss or deny. Even the NFL saw it, finally acknowledging in 2016 the connection between brain injuries and football.

Gary Bettman surely would, too. He’s smart. He loves hockey. Driven to know more than anyone else in the room, he would come to learn the more there is to know, and do what needs to be done. But, instead, he used his considerable intelligence to play “clever lawyer” — show me how this hit in this game led to this memory loss, this CTE, this dementia, and death. Connect the dots, everyone, and if you can’t — no causation, no case.

Able to know more than anyone else in the room, Bettman chose not to know the more there is to know, and instead shrank the room.

All this would be sad, if it weren’t tragic. Sad because Gary Bettman has done many good things for the NHL. Sad because he has in him the ability, authority and trust to do what needs to be done. Sad because, unlike football, it wouldn’t take much to make hockey just as exciting to play and watch, and much less damaging. Tragic, because too many players with lots of money and opportunity retire to life-diminished lives.

When does anger kick in at all this? Outrage? Most of you have been successful in your lives. In your own fields, you are decision-makers. You’ve been in tough spots. You’ve had to do things when you had no idea what to do. So you managed your problem and avoided the worst of it until you came up with something better, or it went away. If you didn’t, you faced the real test — do what has to be done, or hide.

But when you hide inside a shrunken room, you miss what’s going on outside. You keep on saying what you always said, but to others you begin to sound ridiculous, just as Gary Bettman did before a Canadian parliamentary sub-committee a few months ago.