The first full week (ten days, actually) of play in the National Hockey League is completed and the league’s reputation for unpredictability is intact.
To begin with, Chicago Black Hawks fired their coach after only four games have been played. Sure, they were a little slow starting out with a 1-2-1 record. But that’s a little severe, don’t you think? On the other hand, New York Rangers have the best start in their long history, 6-1-1 including a 5-0 start.
Down in Dallas, a rookie player for the Stars, Fabian Brunnstrom, became the 3rd player in the history of the league to score a hat trick in his very first NHL game. The 23-yr.-old Swede was scratched for the first two games, but with an 0-2 start for the team, he was inserted into the lineup on the 15th against Nashville and led the Stars to a 6-4 victory. “The only thing I was just thinking of was going out there and working hard and having fun and enjoying my first NHL game,” said Brunnstrom.
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Fabian Brunnstrom
The strangest event didn’t take place in the NHL, but it involved one of their recent draft picks who showed promise of becoming a star player. Alexei Cherepanov was the Rangers’ first round draft pick last year, but the 19-yr.-old was still playing in his native Russia this year in the Kontinental Hockey League when he collapsed and died on the team bench during a game last week. Preliminary tests indicate that he probably had a heart disease called hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, or HCM, which is a thickening of the heart walls that can lead to sudden cardiac arrest, particularly after intense physical exertion.
While sudden deaths of young professional athletes is rare, the spotlight is being focused on the Kontinental Hockey League. The KHL was organized last year as a high-quality hockey league with a design to become the European equivalent of the NHL. Throwing scads of money out for premium players and setting up a big-league program, the league’s owners are putting up a good front. But behind the scenes they have a lot of work to do. When traveling, the players in the NHL stay in 4-star hotels and have their equipment delivered to the arena for the game. In the KHL they carry their own equipment everywhere with them and stay in the equivalent of Motel 6 with grungy sheets.
Now the Russian Hockey Federation, along with the government and the parliament, are looking into what else is lacking in this “premier” league when it was shown that they had no provisions to take care of any medical emergencies. There was no ambulance at the arena when the young man went down. That is a basic precaution everywhere. And when the ambulance did finally arrive at the arena, the defibrillator didn’t work because the battery was dead. (Well, this is Russia after all.)
It just gets worse. Take a look at this video showing the activity in the bench area when Cherepanov collapses. Supposedly, there was a doctor there. But do you see any doctoring going on? Something else you won’t see either is CPR being instigated. Nobody. No doctor, no team trainer, nobody starts CPR. And to make things even more bizarre, they didn’t even have a stretcher to carry him out on. Disgraceful.
Ok, let’s make sure our batteries aren’t dead and get this equipment checked out. I need to start another pot of coffee.
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