The thought comes in flashes, sudden reminders. When a player gets checked into the bench and his legs dangle over the boards. When someone goes hard to the net, trips over a stick and goes soaring through the air, legs flapping behind him like coat tails. When there’s a battle in the corner and guys are kicking at the puck in an effort to dislodge it.
Even when someone just hops over the boards for a shift change. It’s always there, gnawing at Chicago Blackhawks center Jason Dickinson.
“Personally, it’s never not been on my mind,” Dickinson said. “Ever since I was in junior, I was always super paranoid about my arms being up on the boards and someone jumping over. It was always there in my head that those are blades. Those are sharp. I’ve been cut by much duller things.”
Dickinson’s been on both sides of skate cuts. He had a harrowing near-miss two seasons ago when he caught a skate to the collarbone in a game against the Vegas Golden Knights. And last season, he very nearly took out the eye of Boston Bruins center Jakub Lauko while falling into the boards. Both instances have stayed with him, serving only to deepen that nagging concern in the back of his mind.
Dickinson is a thoughtful and conscientious player. So if anyone in the NHL were going to embrace cut-resistant technology — around the neck, around the wrists, around the Achilles tendons — it’d obviously be Dickinson, right?
Wrong.
“I don’t wear a shirt when I play — I get super hot,” Dickinson said. “So wearing something on my wrist or my neck, I’m going to sweat even more than I already do. So am I at risk for cramping? So I understand. I tried wearing them and I just started overheating. I want to wear them. I wanted to wear them. But I also need to feel good. So if I’m on the bench and I’m getting light-headed or I’m cramping, now I’m also at risk for injury elsewhere. It’s a tough thing.”
One year ago this week, former Pittsburgh Penguins forward Adam Johnson died after an opponent’s skate sliced his neck during a game in Britain’s top hockey league. Amid the shattering grief within the global hockey community arose a discussion about the need to better protect hockey players from what essentially amounts to a three-millimeter-wide knife blade affixed to each player’s foot. As the game gets faster and faster and the players get bigger and bigger, more and more players are losing control of their legs in high-speed collisions in front of the net, along the boards and at the benches. Edmonton Oilers forward Evander Kane had his wrist cut open by Pat Maroon’s skate two years ago. Former Ottawa Senators defenseman Erik Karlsson had his Achilles tendon lacerated by Matt Cooke 11 years ago. Nearly every player has a story about a near-miss; they all just got lucky.
Hockey players see themselves as invincible, a foolhardy but necessary mindset in a fast and violent game. Johnson’s death reminded everyone that they’re not. The on-ice death of a peer was going to serve as a catalyst for change, for players to adapt. It had to.
So one year later, what has changed at the NHL level?
Hardly anything at all.
Neck protection is now mandatory at many of the lower levels, but in the NHL, most teams have one, maybe two, often no players wearing any. They cite comfort. They cite the awkward appearance. They cite their routines.
“I’m not necessarily surprised,” said Blackhawks winger and Johnson’s former Minnesota-Duluth teammate Joey Anderson, who was required to wear a neck guard after Johnson’s death because he was in the AHL at the time, and who continues to wear it in the NHL. “At this age, guys are pretty stubborn. They’re into their routines and set in their ways. It’s hard for guys to change.”
The option to be stubborn, though, is increasingly limited to players at the highest level.
Since Johnson’s death, USA Hockey has made neck protection mandatory for players competing in youth, girls, high school and junior hockey. The International Ice Hockey Federation has done the same for players in all its tournaments, rather than simply those featuring teenagers. All three Canadian major junior leagues now have mandates on the books; the Western Hockey League had been the holdout.
Perhaps most relevantly, the American Hockey League — the final pre-NHL step for many players and a league long used as a testing ground for rule and equipment changes — is now requiring neck protection for all its players and officials.
“Hopefully that’s what’s going to end up happening as we move forward here, that it’s just going to be a piece of their equipment,” AHL president and CEO Scott Howson told the Associated Press before his league started its season. “With the different products out there, hopefully all the players can find something that they can adapt to and eventually like — or, at the very least, not notice when they’re playing hockey.”
In other words, regardless of whether NHL players are on board, the market for neck protection has never been more robust.
The hope, according to those within the industry, is that increased demand leads to higher quality, more options and more palatable price points.
The comfort factor is crucial for widespread adoption by professionals, but it’s less of a pressing issue for beer leaguers, children and others who are competing in leagues with mandates already in place. For that captive audience, according to many manufacturers and stakeholders within the game, the question is a little more simple: How well does the cut-resistant equipment actually work?
“Mandating a piece of equipment which is potentially ineffective is not the answer. The answer is more complicated than just making a rule,” Dr. Mike Stuart told The Athletic. Stuart is the chief medical officer for USA Hockey, a member of the IIHF medical committee, the father of three former NHL players and a longtime champion of increased safety standards in the game.
“We have to make sure what we’re doing is going to be effective,” Stuart said. “And that means developing high-quality and affordable cut-resistant products.”
It’s not that the current standard is lacking, Stuart said. Hockey Canada has long required neck protection certified by Canada’s Bureau de normalisation du Quebec (BNQ), and the BNQ standard is the baseline for the Hockey Equipment Certification Council, a non-profit organization that USA Hockey relies on to certify safety gear such as helmets and visors. The HECC says its goal is to have certification for neck guards in place by 2025. Manufacturers can already apply to the program.
It’s a starting point, according the HECC — not the finish line.
“Let’s try for the best cut-resistant materials with the best anatomic coverage,” Stuart said. “But let’s also test it as best we can and make it hockey-specific.”
For finicky NHL players, comfort and maneuverability is just as important as efficacy when it comes to protective gear. Capitals winger T.J. Oshie’s equipment company, Warroad, was already offering protective gear, and Johnson’s death sparked a massive increase in interest. Warroad’s most effective product in this area is the Tilo “neck and wrist top,” a turtleneck of sorts that offers skate-cut protection around the neck and wrists. Oshie was involved in the design of the shirt, and his experience with standalone neck and wrist sleeves informed the process.
Oshie is American, but whenever his youth teams played in Canada, they were required to wear neck protection. The ones they used were thick, bulky pieces of foam that were hot and itchy and generally awful to wear.
“We’d just end up taping it into a little ball and it turned into a necklace,” Oshie said. “It wasn’t protecting anything.”
Players competing during IIHF tournaments have done the same. “I have pictures from national teams where players would remove the cut-resistant material and wear a little piece of cloth around their neck to satisfy the requirement,” Stuart said. “As a medical professional trying to prevent catastrophic injuries, that mandate is not effective.”
Modern neck guards are made of thinner but stronger fabric, but they still fall out of place or bunch up, leaving much of the neck exposed. Same with the wrist sleeves. By including them as part of the shirt, Oshie said the protection stays in place where players need it. Unsurprisingly, it’s not cheap — the Warroad website lists it at $199 per shirt.
After Johnson’s death, Warroad couldn’t keep up with the initial flood of orders and requests, but Oshie immediately brought some of the shirts to the rink in Washington. A handful of Oshie’s Capitals teammates tried the shirt. None of them stuck with it. They were surprised at how much more comfortable it was than the old bulky guards, but they still found it too warm, too noticeable, too different.
“The one thing I’ve seen in the last 17 years that I’ve been in the league is hockey players aren’t very quick to change what they have,” Oshie said. “Some of the greats in the league now are still using the same cup from when they were in juniors. There’s definitely a superstition thing that goes along with hockey players. When they find something they like, they’re sticking with it. Even if there’s something better.”
One of the first things Oshie did every summer when he was at the University of North Dakota back in the mid-2000s was take the infernal cage off his helmet. A clear view of the ice felt freeing, but it did leave him feeling a little exposed. So he tried a visor. Didn’t take. It always fogged up, there was a glare and it affected his sight too much. So Oshie took off the visor and went old-school, free and easy.
“I was still a stubborn college kid. I was like, ‘I don’t need a visor,’” Oshie said. “Then I took a skate to my right eye and eyebrow. I was like, ‘All right. Maybe I do need a visor.’”
He’s worn one ever since. He learned to manage the fog. He got used to the glare. He can see the puck just fine. It was the same thing the first time he wore his own brand’s shirt, with the built-in neck and wrist protection. After a few practices, it felt entirely normal, like any other article of clothing.
Oshie, who’s sidelined long-term with a chronic back issue, wore the shirt for the duration of last season. But he was very much the exception. While his Warroad gear is in all 32 locker rooms, he said the Philadelphia Flyers’ Travis Konecny is the only NHL player currently wearing the specific Tilo neck-and-wrist protection shirt.
Edmonton Oilers winger Jeff Skinner does wear neck protection, made by Bauer, but he didn’t have some sort of epiphany like Oshie did in college. Johnson’s death didn’t cause a fundamental shift in the way he thought about the game and his own invincibility. Skinner was with the Buffalo Sabres last year, and shortly after Johnson’s death, a stack of turtlenecks designed to protect the neck from skate cuts showed up in the locker room, as it did in a lot of locker rooms. Skinner tried it.
“For me, I don’t know, it felt fine, so I just kept it,” he said.
Skinner only wears the turtleneck during games, not practices. Deep down, he knows the inherent danger of his sport, but it’s not something he thinks about all the time. After all, skate cuts are hardly the only potentially catastrophic injury on the ice. There are rising slap shots headed right for your face and elbows from hard-charging defensemen, and a torn ACL or broken leg can happen at any moment.
“If it happens right in front of you, then maybe it crosses your mind,” he said of skates endangering players. “There’s a lot of stuff going on. There’s body parts flying everywhere, and the puck you’ve got to worry about.”
Skinner commended the league and the manufacturers for making protective gear available, but he also doesn’t blame players who don’t want to wear them. Hockey players are notoriously finicky about the equipment they wear — skates must be tied just so and tape must be applied here, not there. Some players change skates constantly, some wear the same pair all season. Same with sticks and gloves. Some players wear lucky undershirts that have more holes than fabric after years of use. Some, like Dickinson, don’t wear anything at all under their gear.
“Equipment’s a personal thing,” Skinner said.
Johnson’s death hit Anderson harder than most, as the two had been friends and teammates. Wearing the protective collar was a no-brainer for Anderson. But you won’t see him proselytizing around the locker room.
“Guys can see it,” Anderson said. “I’m not an old guy, especially in this locker room. It’s not really my place to push things on guys. If someone asked me, I’d encourage it. But it’s not my place to step in. At the younger levels, they’re enforcing it now. Guys (in the NHL) are just grandfathered into their ways.”
And that’s how the change is likely to happen — slowly, from the ground up. With so many of the lower leagues now requiring protective gear, younger players will grow accustomed to it and bring it with them once they graduate to the NHL. Dickinson guessed that in 10 years, 90 percent of the league will be wearing neck protection regardless of whether the NHL requires it. After all, helmets weren’t mandatory in the NHL until 1979, but Craig MacTavish was still going lidless as late as 1997 because he was grandfathered in.
The rise of concussions didn’t convince all players that helmets were worthwhile. Gruesome eye injuries from sticks and pucks didn’t change hearts and minds overnight about visors. And Johnson’s death, shattering as it was for the hockey world, did little to change NHL players’ attitudes about protective neck gear.
“The story did end up fizzling out,” Dickinson said. “Unfortunately, it’s not a hot topic. But I think it should still be on guys’ minds. There’s real risk.”
There’s also real reason for optimism, even if it takes a generation to bear out. Stuart has witnessed it — and spurred it — firsthand. In 2002, while a co-director of the Mayo Clinic Sports Medicine Center, he co-authored a study on facial protection in hockey. He presented that research to the AHL, and it helped prompt the league to make visors mandatory for the 2006-07 season. Seven years later, they were mandatory for new NHL players. He sees that as “a kind of prelude” to the cut protection dialogue.
“I’m very encouraged because I think the entire hockey family is becoming more accepting. They realize the importance. And we also certainly understand the comfort factor, the cost factor,” he said. “These are all things that we have to work together on to make it not only effective but comfortable and affordable. And I think that’s happening.”
(Illustration: Dan Goldfarb / The Athletic. Photos: Patrick Smith, Jeanine Leech / Icon Sportswire, Brett Holmes / Icon Sportswire / Getty Images)
