Paul Kariya never saw Scott Stevens coming, but he did foretell his own demise.
“There’s too much of a lack of respect players have for one another — and it’s got to stop,” said Kariya. “If the league wants to stop that kind of conduct, it will have to punish players. ... Ten-game suspensions ... and more, have to be brought back to help wake up players, to teach them about having respect for one another."
Kariya could have made that statement when he retired Wednesday because of concussion problems after 15 years in hockey — and he did make some like it — but that quote is actually from a Sporting News article in the summer of ’98.
Kariya had missed the final 28 games of the previous NHL season and the 1998 Nagano Olympics in his parents’ birth country after a vicious cross check to the jaw by Chicago’s Gary Suter left him with his fourth reported concussion. Suter got a four-game suspension.
The then-Anaheim Mighty Ducks star knew that more of the same was coming if the NHL didn’t rein in the players, or more importantly, if the players didn’t rein themselves in.
“If you want to know the truth,” Kariya said then. “There probably isn’t a player in the league who hasn’t had a concussion.”
Nothing’s changed in those 13 years, except the increasing rate of reported brain injuries. This is the NHL’s Concussion Era and it remains to be seen how many players will be robbed of their potential brilliance — or even worse, as Kariya fears.
“The thing that I worry about is that you’ll get a guy who is playing with a concussion, and he gets hit, and he dies at centre ice,” Kariya told the Globe and Mail in an interview Wednesday. “Can you imagine what would happen to the league if a guy dies at centre ice?”
Well, one died inside the blue line. His name was Bill Masterton and his death in a game in January of 1968 while playing for Minnesota remains the NHL’s only fatality. A recent Star investigation showed Masterton was already likely suffering from a concussion when the fatal blow came.
Kariya knows all too well concussions still aren’t treated with the proper severity in the NHL, that there is too much pressure on players to come back before their brains are healed. He faced it throughout his career and it’s a big part of why he was never able to capitalize on his full potential.
That he would come out with such a bold statement is significant. Kariya is the last guy to seek the public eye. This is a well-spoken but soft-spoken athlete, not one given to hyperbole at all.
Will the NHL pay heed to what he’s saying? They didn’t when he was a marquee player. He’ll be even easier to ignore now.
But he was a special player, overcoming what he lacked in stature with immense speed and skill. This was a guy who lived to play in the Olympics, winning silver with the Canadian team at the 1994 Lillehammer Games (coming out on the losing end of a shootout on Peter Forsberg’s amazing goal for Sweden) and was part of the gold medal squad at the 2002 Salt Lake Games.
The 36-year-old from North Vancouver came up just short of 1,000 NHL games (989) in a career that began with the Anaheim Mighty Ducks plucking him with the fourth overall pick out of the University of Maine. He had one 50-goal season and two with more than 40, while scoring over 100 points twice for Anaheim.
He amassed a total of 402 goals and 587 assists overall in his career while also playing for Colorado, Nashville and finishing with St. Louis, where he had 18 goals and 25 assists in 75 games in the 2009-10 season.
He badly wanted to come back for more, but his brain — or rather the physicians advising him — wouldn’t let him. Even after sitting out a year of hockey, he hadn’t healed enough after his last concussion.
One of the enduring moments of Kariya for hockey fans will be Game 6 of the 2003 Stanley Cup final against New Jersey, when Stevens laid him out with a crushing blindside hit. Kariya lay on his back, his breath fogging his visor. He left the ice but came back to score an important goal to force a Game 7, which they lost.
It’s been said he doesn’t remember scoring that goal. A heroic moment, but who knows how much it contributed to his problems.
Columnist Wayne Scanlan of the Ottawa Citizen wrote of that game: “The Hit also happens to be a pretty convenient metaphor for the game of hockey itself. Kariya gets back up. Just as hockey always gets back up.”
Kariya couldn’t get back up this time. The jury’s out on hockey.