Snider: NHL's gear and character flawed

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CHICAGO -- The way Flyers chairman Ed Snider sees it, as much as he enjoys todays NHL product, he feels it has some serious flaws.

And those flaws are related to player equipment and player character.

Snider said on Monday evening in Chicago at the U.S. Hockey Hall of Fame induction ceremonies that he feels there is more awareness now among his brethren about concussions and their ramifications, but the root causes have to do with player size, speed and equipment.

A lot of times, particularly in the old days, guys got banged in the head and they didnt wear helmets, they figured they had a headache for a couple of days, when they had concussions, Snider said.

I think a lot of it is due to the equipment today. In the old days, you had soft shoulder pads and didnt have a whole lot of equipment or helmets. I think players respected each other more. They grow up now in junior with these masks and so forth and hit up high. Its a different game. Obviously, its a very serious problem.

St. Louis Blues executive John Davidson, talking about the continuing number of concussions in hockey, agreed, saying it comes down to three things.

The speed of the gameits so much faster than when I played, Davidson said. The equipment is so hard and the players dont respect each other as much as before.

The respect factor bothers Snider, as well. Listening to him, its obvious he wishes there was more league-wide tolerance for players who enforced respect on the ice and fought when it was necessary to fight and not just for fightings sake.

Theres not as much respect as there was in the old days, Snider said. And maybe there is not as much respect because we dont have the kind of policeman we used to have in the old days. There had to be respect or you paid a price.

It should be noted that none of the Flyers players currently out of the lineup with a concussion or suspected concussion have been injured because of a head shot from another player.

No one is sure about where Brayden Schenns concussion occurred; Chris Pronger appears to have a rare eye concussion; and Claude Giroux took an accidental knee to the head from his teammate Wayne Simmonds. The Flyers remain uncertain as to whether Giroux is concussed.

On a related topic, general manager Paul Holmgren said that Prongers exam in Pittsburgh was moved back from Monday to Wednesday because of a scheduling conflict involving the neurologists who are going to exam Pronger.

E-mail Tim Panaccio at tpanotch@comcast.net

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