CBC-Sports

Disclosing injuries can put players at risk

October 31, 2008 12:47 PM | Posted by   Kelly Hrudey  

Last Sunday I read Cassie Campbell Pascal’s article on this site concerning her feelings about finding the proper balance between fitness and rest.

In the article, my good friend Cassie mentioned that there may be an increase in total league-wide injuries because the players at times train too hard.

This coincides with a new league directive that allows each team to not fully disclose injuries if they chose to do so for the protection of the player.

This surfaced recently when the Islanders Rick DiPietro left a game with an injury of which the Islanders chose to only say, “lower body injury”.

Intentional vagueness

This policy I agree with because far too often when accurately disclosing a player’s injury, opposing players will do everything they can to take advantage of the situation.

Here are two situations using both examples to make my case.

Remember Oleg Tverdovsky? He was an up-and-coming, puck-moving defenceman that started his career in Anaheim in 1994.

I believe early the next season, it was disclosed that Tverdovsky suffered from some sort of chronic foot ailment. To make matters worse, both feet were affected.

Unfortunately we played against the Ducks shortly after this disclosure and I don’t think I’ve seen a guy get slashed more often on his feet in a game. It looked very painful and he certainly looked in great discomfort but because we knew about it, we tried to expose a weakness.

I’m pretty sure he would have preferred not having the whole league know he had problematic feet.

Keeping it secret

The next situation involved myself, my first year in San Jose.

I shared goalie duties with a really good guy, Chris Terreri, but shortly after opening the season, Chris broke his hand in a game in St. Louis.

A couple of games after that, I separated my right shoulder and our goalie prospects at that time weren’t ready for NHL action.

The Sharks chose not to tell anybody about my injury.

So I ended up playing 12 straight with a separated shoulder. This kind of injury made it impossible for me to raise my arm over my shoulder.

If the other teams around the league would have known of my injury, without question every shot would have been high to my stick side.

I, of course, would not have faired well under those circumstances.

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