The NHL's Injury Report Problem

On October 3rd, the Montreal Canadiens announced that forward Ivan Demidov would miss two to four weeks with a lower-body injury.

Well, we’re now approaching six weeks that Demidov has been out, and we’ve rarely even seen him on the ice getting anywhere close to a return to play.

The only real injury update we’ve gotten came from his agent, Dan Milstein, who said about a week ago that Demidov fractured his ankle and would be back in the lineup in a few weeks.

Meanwhile, the team’s update has basically been that there is no update and that he’s on his own timeline.

I'm sorry, that’s just not good enough.

Obviously, the Canadiens are doing well without Ivan Demidov as they have a 12-3-4 record and have survived his absence quite well.

All that said, this isn’t a post about Demidov’s injury itself or whether the Canadiens can survive without him.

This is a post from the perspective of a sports fan and my frustration with the NHL’s complete lack of transparency and honesty with its fans when it comes to injuries.

Believe or not, it appears that in hockey, there are only two types of injuries: an upper-body injury and a lower-body injury.

How vague is that?

While I can appreciate wanting to protect players’ health and privacy, it gets to a point where it becomes borderline unethical to your consumers.

We’re living in a day and age where the NHL promotes gambling 24/7. The league constantly promotes itself as the best league in the world. But then when it comes to something as basic as injury information, fans are given vague injury reports and timelines that often turn out to be completely unreliable.

I just don’t think NHL fans can accept that anymore, and you can tell people are starting to get super annoyed with it.

Look around at other sports, like the NFL and the NBA. As much as the NHL likes to claim that it’s the best league in the world, maybe it’s time to start taking a page out of some of these other leagues’ books.

In the NFL, if a guy has a cold, you’ll see it on the injury report. Teams are required to be transparent because their so in bed with gambling companies and its now such a massive part of sports.

Every piece of information matters.

The NBA is the same way. They’ll literally tell you that a player is out because of rest. Now, you can disagree about whether resting healthy players is fair to fans, but at least fans know why that player isn’t playing.

In the NHL, nobody knows what these injuries actually are. Nobody knows how long players are going to be out. And when teams do provide a timeline, it often feels like you can’t even trust it.

I also think we’ve gone past the day and age where we need to pretend that teams are going to send players out specifically to target another player’s injured shoulder or ankle.

That just doesn't happen anymore.

Hockey is a physical game. Injuries are part of the game. If a player isn’t healthy enough to play, I completely understand that.

But at least be honest with the fans about what they’re dealing with and how long they’re expected to be out.

You don’t need to release every single medical detail, but saying a player has a fractured ankle and is expected to miss six to eight weeks should not be some massive secret.

Especially in a day and age when you’re promoting gambling 24/7, transparency is more important than ever.

Get it right Gary!