Mike Chen at SBNation.com has a good read on concussions in today’s game. He relates the current culture around the issue with the way things were back in the late 90s when Eric Lindros was suffering from the same issues Marc Savard and Sidney Crosby are suffering from today.
2011 is a far different environment than the late 1990s. Before Lindros’ concussion woes really started in 1998, the former Hart Trophy winner and Philadelphia Flyers captain was the decade’s face of the NHL. Young, handsome, brutal, and skilled; on paper Lindros was a marketing person’s dream. You could show highlight reels of Lindros running over defensemen or scoring goals or you could plant his camera-friendly face next to a product — or you could do both, as Nike and other corporate partners did.
For the first half of his career, Lindros was scoring at the fourth-best points-per-game rate in NHL history, but he played with an edge that Wayne Gretzky and Mario Lemieux didn’t. For casual sports fans of the 1990s, Lindros was the present and the future of the NHL; there’s a reason why the Wells Fargo Center is still seen by some as The House That Lindros Built.
(Younger NHL fans may not remember this Lindros; instead, they may only recall seeing the player who really was a shell of his former self after landing with the New York Rangers and other teams. Generational players are supposed to still be effective at age 34, but by the time Lindros played his final season with the Dallas Stars, there just wasn’t much gas left in the tank.)
I’d highly recommend checking out the whole thing, for nothing other than a little historical perspective on today’s concussion debate.
