Injury avoidance

[VirginiaMtlExpat]

There are players, and perhaps also teams, with specific expertise in avoiding injuries and staying healthy. The Canadiens should have an expert whose full time job is understanding the science (biomechanics) of staying healthy. Someone with a biomechanics background. Even if it means tweaking equipment, or the boards, or quality control of the ice, or preventative training.

This is one of the richest franchises, and it should be pioneering in this area.

With its resources, it can easily do better.

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[StCaufield]

There are players, and perhaps also teams, with specific expertise in avoiding injuries and staying healthy. The Canadiens should have an expert whose full time job is understanding the science (biomechanics) of staying healthy. Someone with a biomechanics background. Even if it means tweaking equipment, or the boards, or quality control of the ice, or preventative training.

This is one of the richest franchises, and it should be pioneering in this area.

With its resources, it can easily do better.

Or we just have a team made of glass. Which we do. No matter who’s around to help

 

[VirginiaMtlExpat]

Or we just have a team made of glass. Which we do. No matter who’s around to help

I don't subscribe to victim mentality. I believe in science and information. There are the doers and there are the excuse makers. There are indeed random aspects to a contact sport, but there are also durable practitioners, who can serve as templates. Montreal is a hotbed of deep learning with several top universities. Put em to work.

 

[MasterD]

There really isn't much they can do as far as I can see, the equipment and rink are regulated by the league, aren't they?

Freak accidents like Dach's happen.

Players like Guhle need to learn to protect themselves - there really isn't any magic here, he's just putting himself into dangerous position again and again! The team has proven they will do what they have to do to help players - Slaf with the VR goggles seemed to help him avoid hits to the head. At some point, the player also needs to make the required effort,

 

[Chili]

Hockey is a very physical sport; injuries are part of the game. I do believe a player can increase his chances of avoiding injuries though. Mark Messier used to say, 'head on a swivel'. I cringe sometimes when I see guys turn their back with the puck along the boards. If you have the puck, you're a target. You need to be prepared to be hit or know how to escape.

Some teams appear to do this better than the pack. Dallas is one team I've noticed the last two years have used very few players. Believe it has helped them develop their prospects who aren't going back and forth from the minors.

Part of it is style of play too. Gallagher spends a lot of his time in front of the net. That role is a magnet for pain. Dmen have a lot of physical battles. I haven't researched this but seems like goaltenders have been injured more then ever of late.

 

[Habs]

There are players, and perhaps also teams, with specific expertise in avoiding injuries and staying healthy. The Canadiens should have an expert whose full time job is understanding the science (biomechanics) of staying healthy. Someone with a biomechanics background. Even if it means tweaking equipment, or the boards, or quality control of the ice, or preventative training.

This is one of the richest franchises, and it should be pioneering in this area.

With its resources, it can easily do better.

This team has loved icing small teams and employing the dump and chase since 94 , a bad combination. They should 100% hire an expert and use a complimentary system that fits the team dynamics.

 

[Habsrule]

When at the combine get every prospect to spit into a tube. Send those samples off for DNA family lineage testing and see who comes back with the most neananderthal DNA and draft those thick bones players. They are less likely to get injured due to their body composition.










Just kidding

 

[StCaufield]

I don't subscribe to victim mentality. I believe in science and information. There are the doers and there are the excuse makers. There are indeed random aspects to a contact sport, but there are also durable practitioners, who can serve as templates. Montreal is a hotbed of deep learning with several top universities. Put em to work.

I subscribe that people are naturally injury prone. Not a victim mentality it’s just facts. A beeeze takes out half of the team

 

[Lshap]

It's an interesting subject that most of us have no qualifications to comment on. Anecdotally, yeah, when a team is among the most-injured year after year there could be something wrong with the formula. At some point it stops being bad luck.

Either way, the Habs should hire experts who can confirm what is – or isn't – going on.

 

[VirginiaMtlExpat]

It's an interesting subject that most of us have no qualifications to comment on. Anecdotally, yeah, when a team is among the most-injured year after year there could be something wrong with the formula. At some point it stop being bad luck.

Either way, the Habs should hire experts who can confirm what is – or isn't – going on.

I think that it benefits from a stats-based, biomechanics-infused, hockey-savvy approach, which is conducive to on-ice success. Even a low-tech, data-intensive method is better than what is done now.

For example, look at players like Suzuki who are durable, on game film, and zoom in on what they do to avoid serious injury in the most dangerous collisions. Do this for the top 30-40 ironman players, and then do a study in contrast with oft-injured players, in similar scenarios. I bet that a biomechanics-trained hockey analyst will spot systematic differences in the response to these plays. A high tech approach would involve neural networks-based human pose estimation that could actually feed into biomechanical simulations, but that could come later.

Go back to that latest Dach injury due to the hit by Tinordi. Would Suzuki or any of the other ironmen been impacted similarly? I bet not, though I don't know for sure. This needs a combination of hockey knowledge and biomechanics to define what the ironmen do better.

Also, look at training practices of these ironmen. Do they emphasize specific strength training for vulnerable areas? Do they work flexibility training more or differently? Yoga? Preventative PT? Maybe look at other sports. A guy like Djokovic took almost two decades of pounding on tennis courts, with few injuries till recently.

That would be the job, for the right candidate.

 

[Paddyjack]

When at the combine get every prospect to spit into a tube. Send those samples off for DNA family lineage testing and see who comes back with the most neananderthal DNA and draft those thick bones players. They are less likely to get injured due to their body composition.










Just kidding

I'm pretty sure Lucic would be off this chart... and not just bones

 

[JianYang]

I have a couple thoughts on this.

1) when a team is in a clear rebuild mode where wins take a backseat to development, I think teams certain injuries will be dealt with differently. My theory is that rebuilding teams are extra cautious to sit guys out or shut them down whereas if it is a contender, then envelope will be pushed a bit more to try and so what is possible to stay in the lineup.

2) we need to be careful in labeling guys as injury prone. Sometimes, it really just comes down to a string of bad luck. Koivu was generally healthier as his career went along, but he had that glass label early on. Ditto for alfredsson. My thought is if it's a young guy with lots of runway, I be even more cautious of putting that label on.

So the message from me is that I think some of the man games lost will take care of itself as the team becomes more compeitive, and I'd be patient with the young guys who are running into the injury bug.

 

[ngc_5128]

I could be mis-remembering things here, but I seem to recall a number of years ago people talking about Montreal having some of the stiffest boards in the NHL. This would have been in the context of a different team also having a reputation for that after a couple of years filled with injuries who had adjusted the stiffness of the boards and saw a reduction in the number of injuries. I wonder how much truth there is in that statement, and if making a change would be effective in reducing injuries.

 

[VirginiaMtlExpat]

I could be mis-remembering things here, but I seem to recall a number of years ago people talking about Montreal having some of the stiffest boards in the NHL. This would have been in the context of a different team also having a reputation for that after a couple of years filled with injuries who had adjusted the stiffness of the boards and saw a reduction in the number of injuries. I wonder how much truth there is in that statement, and if making a change would be effective in reducing injuries.

This is part of what I am getting at. We could make them extremely compliant, even spring-loaded and made of a synthetic material that produces a true puck bounce while at the same time providing plenty of give for a pair of 200-pounders crashing into it. They don't have to be wooden anymore, as they were 100 years ago when the game was played by 170 pounders and slower than now.

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That would be part of that injury prevention biomechanicist's job description. Some musculoskeletal simulations could actually be used to explore competing designs. If compliant boards reduce injuries at home games, and HuGo mention that at the next GMs meeting, you will see more and more of these boards popping up around the league.

Once again, unlike some others above, I don't believe in throwing up my hands and concluding that this just the fate of the team. We can influence this outcome with suitable technical choices and training methods. If these measures, in the aggregate, have the intended results, I could imagine several teams eventually doing this (creating this position), in order to give themselves a better chance of icing a healthy team. In the same way that many are creating an analytics position. This could be the next trend, with the Habs on the forefront.