Jack Todd: Canadiens want to guard gamers from their warrior mentalities

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When Brendan Gallagher was speaking final week about making an attempt to play hockey on a damaged ankle, it jogged my memory of a sizzling summer season day in New York Metropolis in 1984 after I ran the size of an outside basketball court docket to dam a shot whereas travelling full pace from left to proper.

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My proper ankle wouldn’t take the stress of the touchdown. In seconds, the swelling was the dimensions of a softball. After a 15-hour wait on the emergency ward at Harlem Hospital, I received the excellent news/dangerous information report from the physician: The ankle wasn’t damaged, however a extreme sprain will be worse than a break.

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He was proper. Even now, that ankle appears to be like like I spent the previous 30 years pounding on it with a tire iron.

Not as soon as within the months it took that mess to heal did I take into consideration making an attempt to play on it. Then once more, I’m not Gallagher. Nor Sean Monahan, who tried to play on a damaged foot. Nor Steve Bégin, who has at all times been my gold customary on the subject of the insane toughness of hockey gamers.

However that very high quality, their toughness, additionally looms as one of many largest obstacles the Canadiens face as they try and put the damage bug behind them. Kent Hughes and Jeff Gorton have made it clear that reviewing the workforce’s strategy to damage prevention and therapy is a precedence. But when the system goes to enhance, the Canadiens want just a little assist from their associates — the blokes who put on the uniforms.

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“Am I completely sincere (with the medical workers)? Most likely not,” Gallagher mentioned. “They assess you, they cope with you, however they’ll solely cope with a lot data. As a participant, you will have that accountability.”

Monahan, for his half, admitted “it was my selection” to play with a damaged foot — a call that led to a different damage and groin surgical procedure. “I’ve performed by means of a whole lot of accidents in my profession, and I’ve performed by means of a damaged foot a number of occasions,” Monahan mentioned. “I actually wished to play that recreation towards Calgary.”

Everyone knows the legends: Bob Gainey battling by means of a playoff sequence towards St. Louis with two separated shoulders, a clearly concussed Rocket Richard getting off a coaching desk and skating onto the ice to attain the profitable purpose towards Boston.

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It’s a harmful observe, particularly when concussions are concerned — however how do you inform a man who’s keen to place his face in entrance of a 100-m.p.h. slapshot that perhaps he must be rather less robust? Spend just a little time round hockey gamers and you’d swear that half of them are categorically insane and the opposite half are borderline. Why else would you threat your valuable self within the face of sharp skates and sharper elbows, inflexible boards, sticks, scorching pucks and common mayhem?

Maybe what the coaching workers actually wants is a unique sort of diagnostic software — a lie-detector.

“Are you good to go, Gally?”

“Yep.”

“Beep!” Lie-detector says no.

From Nagano to Brampton: 1 / 4-century in the past, I coated a superb a part of the inaugural Olympic girls’s hockey event in Nagano.

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It was a historic occasion, one that may change the game endlessly. However regardless of the apparent talent concerned, the sport appeared comparatively gradual. That remark, I think, didn’t make it into many tales, as a result of all of us wished to see the sport thrive — nevertheless it was in all probability true nonetheless.

Quick ahead to Brampton Sunday evening with the U.S. and Canada in one more titanic battle for world championship gold. From the primary puck drop, each groups have been flying. In case you might watch that recreation on a break up display screen with the 1998 ultimate between the identical two groups, I’m sure the distinction could be dramatic.

A few weeks after the ladies’s March Insanity competitors within the U.S. drew way more consideration than a dreary males’s event, girls’s hockey staged one other dramatic demonstration of the strides the game has made up to now 25 years.

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Sure, the mistaken workforce received (the U.S. additionally took the gold in Nagano) however the true winner was the ladies’s recreation itself. It’s quick, livid and intensely tough — and if there’s a authorized verify, you don’t need to struggle some goon after.

Fearless prediction: The Toronto Maple Leafs, 19 years faraway from their final playoff sequence win and 56 years after their final Stanley Cup, will lastly escape the primary spherical by getting previous the fading Tampa Bay Lightning in six video games.

Sadly, the Leafs nonetheless received’t finish their Stanley Cup drought. These Bruins are a bridge too far for the Leafs and everybody else. They win Lord Stanley’s bauble in seven video games over Colorado.

Heroes: Sarah Fillier, Marie-Philip Poulin, Jamie Lee Rattray, Sarah Nurse, Hilary Knight, Nick Suzuki, Samuel Montembeault, Mike Matheson, Alex Belzile, Rafaël Harvey-Pinard, Patrice Bergeron &&&& final however not least, Martin St. Louis.

Alexander Ovechkin, Hockey Canada, Soccer Canada, Dillon Brooks, Alek Manoah, Bo Bichette’s hair, Joey Saputo, Daniel Snyder, James Dolan, Claude Brochu, David Samson &&&& final however not least, Jeffrey Loria.

Now and endlessly.

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