In this deal, the NHL wins and players lose

By Medicine Hat News Opinon on November 19, 2018.

A tentative settlement in a lawsuit over concussions would pay hundreds of former NHL players just a few million dollars more than John Tavares of the Toronto Maple Leafs (the league’s highest-paid player) will earn in a single season.

And once lawyers’ fees and costs are deducted from the $19-million (U.S.) deal, the players would be left with just over $11 million to divide among them. That’s less than Jonathan Toews will earn with the Chicago Blackhawks this year alone.

It’s a paltry sum by any accounting in professional sports. And it looks even worse beside the $1-billion-plus deal reached not long ago in a similar lawsuit over concussions involving the National Football League.

There are legitimate reasons for some of that discrepancy, including the number of players involved. But ultimately, the NHL has offered so little because it’s banking it can get away with it.

Five years ago, a group of former NHL players set out to hold the league to account for failing to protect them from head injuries or even warn them of the risks — while it was promoting and profiting from violence in the game. But this past summer the players were dealt a blow when a U.S. judge ruled that their lawsuit could not be treated as a class action, which would have opened it to more than 5,000 former players.

That left these few players trying to take on a $5-billion industry that still questions the link between concussions in hockey and long-term brain damage. It didn’t help that they don’t even have the vocal backing of the sport’s biggest current and former stars.

That power imbalance is how the 318 players involved wound up with the deal currently on the table: $22,000 each and the possibility of $75,000 more for medical treatment.

It’s not enough, not by a long shot.

It’s not enough for the men who continue to suffer years after playing a game in which they were expected to shake off a hit to the head and jump back into the fray, only to suffer headaches, memory loss, mood changes and far worse later on.

It’s also not nearly enough to act as any sort of acknowledgement that the league bears some responsibility for how it treated (or, more accurately, didn’t medically treat) these players. That was further driven home by the league’s statement on Monday about the settlement. “The NHL,” it said, “does not acknowledge any liability for any of (the) Plaintiffs’ claims in these cases.”

That announcement went out the very same day that NHL commissioner Gary Bettman was inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame as a “builder.”

In his 25 years at the head of the NHL, Bettman has built a bigger, more popular and vastly more profitable league to the point that expansion franchises now go for $600 million or more. But there were costs along the way, and Bettman steadfastly refuses to acknowledge what science knows — that repeated hits to the head can lead to brain injury.

This settlement will allow him to continue doing that, since any player who signs it waives his rights to future concussion-related legal action. So, barring high-profile athletes deciding to try their chances separately, this basically lets the NHL turn the page on an issue that had the potential to deliver a major financial and public relations hit.

The NHL claims the settlement is “a fair and reasonable resolution.” But it is neither.

This is a victory for the league, which put players in harm’s way and, to some degree, still does by refusing to completely ban all shots to the head.

Even if the majority of players, as expected, sign on to the deal, it should never be seen as any sort of justice.