Watch the video above: New research shows preventable hockey injuries costs the NHL hundreds of millions of dollars, with concussions topping the list of most expensive injuries. Jennifer Tryon reports.
TORONTO — Toronto Maple Leafs player Joffrey Lupul broke his back and missed a full season in 2010. But he says he knows it’s all part of the game.
“That’s just the risk that comes with playing professional hockey. So we take a risk with our body and obviously the team’s taking a risk financially,” Lupul told Global News.
During that year, he had two surgeries. A new Canadian study suggests that lower body injury cost $117,000, but Lupul’s sure the final price tag was more than that.
Between the bodychecking, the lingering concussions, and the broken bones, how much are NHL owners shelling out to care for their injured players?
The new study out of St. Michael’s Hospital suggests that the bill to cover hockey injuries topped $650 million in just three years, with concussions making up the bulk of the expenses.
Lead researcher Dr. Michael Cusimano hopes his latest findings on the money-draining aspect will draw NHL owners to take steps to improve player safety.
The Toronto neurosurgeon and researcher has extensively studied player safety and treated concussion for decades. What piqued Cusimano’s interest was that the sports entertainment industry had said that keeping violence in the sport would help make profit. After crunching numbers, Cusimano found that there are other costs and implications to peoples’ health at risk.
“Employers are morally responsible for protecting their employees. The NHL owners need to do a better job of protecting their athletes — if not for their players, then for their own pocketbooks,” Cusimano said.
READ MORE: Ice hockey makes up nearly half of all head injuries in young Canadian athletes
His findings suggest that during the 2009-10, 2010-11 and 2011-12 regular seasons, more than 63 per cent of the 1,307 NHL players who laced up their skates missed at least one game because of a hockey-related injury.
Over the course of those three seasons, $653 million was doled out to athletes who had to sit out.
Cusimano and his team even broke down the injuries to consider what part of the body was hurt to see which injuries were the most expensive.
READ MORE: One in five high school students suffered brain injury, study suggests
During a 30-week sample, head and neck injuries, such as concussion, had the most effect. They were the second-most common injury, they led to the most games missed (11) and they were the single most expensive type of injury.
Time lost to concussions alone made up $42.8 million each year. It cost $353,300 on average to treat a single head or neck injury.
There’s also a trickle down effect: Cusimano took Sidney Crosby as an example. If Crosby sustained an injury and couldn’t play, fans wouldn’t turn out to games and choose to keep their cash in their pockets instead.
“So then there are other costs that are kind of indirect…when he was hurt, I heard that a lot of those attendance figures were down because Crosby wasn’t coming there,” Cusimano said.
The NHL Players’ Association told Global News that it didn’t have any comment. The NHL did not yet respond to a media request.
Leafs left winger James Van Riemsdyk says he’s not sure what these findings could result in.
“It’s tough to say how they could use data like that. Everyone who laces up their skates knows there’s risk of injury and you can’t really change the way you play just because of that. You got to do what you got to do to be effective out there,” he said.
The bottom line to Leafs defenseman Morgan Reilly is a healthy team.
“When you have a healthy team, that’s what it’s all about. You can’t control injuries and you can’t really plan for them, especially that would be the aspect of it that’s tough,” he said.
“You just kind of have to work through it and obviously when you get hurt, the team’s not happy, the players are not happy. It’s just as aspect of hockey that you have to deal with and you got to battle through it,” he said.
In his draft year, he hurt his knee and nearly missed the whole season.
Turns out, leg and foot injuries were the most common injury during that sample – they made up 30 per cent of the payout for injuries at $68 million. But if you had a leg or foot injury, you were sitting out of about 10 games.
READ MORE: Bodychecking rules don’t help limit concussions in the NHL, Canadian research suggests
Rule 48, enacted in 2010, banned blind side hits to the head. Cusimano’s research suggested that despite this crackdown on violence, more needs to be done to curb head shots.
“This research shows that preventable injuries – such as concussions, that are clearly violent acts in 88 per cent of cases – have an important economic burden in addition to the high personal health costs that players bear,” he said.
His full findings were published Monday in the British Medical Journal’s Injury Prevention.
carmen.chai@globalnews.ca
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