If you listened to Panthers forward Sam Bennett talk about his hit to the head of Maple Leafs goaltender Anthony Stolarz in Monday’s Game 1 of this already-fractious first-round playoff series, it was as though the dastardly media was making noise about nothing.
Bennett, in his telling, made it seem like an inadvertent love tap between old teammates.
“It was just a bump,” Bennett said. “When it happened, I didn’t even realize I had made contact.”
You’d like to take Bennett, a Team Canada stalwart, at his word. But let’s be clear: Given the nature of cutthroat gamesmanship, you can’t. Not that anyone’s suggesting Bennett ventured into the Leafs crease to injure Stolarz. But given that Bennett makes a good living pushing the boundaries of what’s permissible, it’s safe to assume he went in there to at least rattle him.
“I play on the edge,” Bennett said. “I try not to cross that line.”
He said he tries. He didn’t say he succeeds. Bennett insisted “there wasn’t a lot of force” in the now-infamous hit. But here’s what we know. There was enough force that it left Stolarz, who at six-foot-six and 243 pounds is five inches taller and 50 pounds heavier than Bennett, momentarily flat on his face and clutching his head in the crease.
You know the rest of the story. Stolarz kept playing for a while. Not long after he was seen vomiting on the bench. Before the evening was over, and the Leafs won 5-4 to take a 1-0 series lead, Stolarz was taken to hospital on a stretcher in an ambulance.
Perhaps not surprisingly, concussion experts saw the hit differently than the Panther who doled it out.
Said Charles Tator, the pc28neurosurgeon who’s been treating athletes with the symptoms of concussions for decades: “The amount of force delivered to the brain was, I would say, gigantic, because Stolarz’s head really did move dramatically to the right.”
That Stolarz was vomiting, Tator said, was a sign that Stolarz had suffered a concussion or worse.
“Vomiting after a head hit of that magnitude is at least a concussion. It could be more than a concussion. It could be a bruise to the brain, or it could be a blood clot,” Tator said.
The good news from Leafs practice Tuesday was that Stolarz was back with the team and “doing well,” according to head coach Craig Berube. The goaltender’s availability for Wednesday’s Game 2 remains in doubt.
There was another view of the hit. Earlier in the game Stolarz took a puck to the head that knocked off his mask. When Chris Nowinski, CEO of the Concussion Legacy Foundation, looked at video of that play, he saw something concussion experts consider significant. Stolarz, in the aftermath of taking that puck to the mask, . That specific movement, now identified by researchers as a Spontaneous Headshake After a Kinematic Event (SHAAKE), was singled out in a .
“We surveyed athletes last year and found that when they exhibited that movement after a blow to the head, most of the time it was because they felt a concussion symptom,” said Nowinski, who was one of the study’s authors.
With that in mind, Nowinksi said, “there is potential (Stolarz) suffered two concussions in the same game.”
“And if that did occur it might explain why his symptoms were so severe,” Nowinski said. “Vomiting on the ice is not something you almost ever see.”
Nowinski said moments like Monday’s always make him consider the bigger picture. The NHL still insists there is “no definitive link” between repetitive head hits and CTE, or Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, the degenerative brain disease that has been found in athletes with concussion history. Meanwhile, the wider scientific community, and even the NFL, stopped arguing about this most of a decade ago.
Stubbornness has its consequences. Certainly it might help explain why the opening days of the Stanley Cup playoffs has seen a steady stream of shady hits, not all of which have been met with suspensions, and why Stolarz was not removed from Monday’s game at the behest of a league concussion spotter. Nowinski said that to his knowledge the league has not added SHAAKE to its watch list for spotters.
“I worry that because we’ve been so critical of the NHL on their CTE denial that they are not adding SHAAKE to their concussion sign list out of spite rather than doing what’s best for the players,” Nowinski said.
Tator, for his part, said Bennett ought to have been suspended “at least” two games, although Tuesday came and went without league discipline being imposed or expected.
“The goalie shouldn’t be hit like that,” Tator said. “I would put (Bennett) out at least two games, because he took no effort to avoid the collision. I think that’s an assault on the goalie.”
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