Donnellon: Flyers' Giroux center of concussion question

MIDWAY THROUGH the first period of the Flyers' 3-2 overtime victory Monday night, Winnipeg's 6-5, 260-pound defenseman, Dustin Byfuglien, pounded Brayden Schenn into the corner boards. Schenn crumpled to the ice, wobbled to his feet, and skated slowly to his bench.

Two periods later, desperately trying to regain a lead lost, Jake Voracek drove hard to the net and collided with Jets defenseman Jacob Trouba, whose leg violently snapped back the head of his goaltender Ondrej Pavelec, who collapsed forward, holding his head. As Voracek looked on, concerned for his hometown friend and Czech national teammate, Winnipeg trainer Rob Milette rushed onto the ice and spent the next few minutes apparently determining whether Pavelec could continue.

"I didn't want to leave the game," Pavelec said. "I was scared, too. But I'm good. It wasn't too serious."

Schenn, too, remained in the game and later registered a point without a visit to the quiet room, much to the relief of the Flyers and their fans. His breakout season is one of the lesser-told stories of the team's surprising surge towards a playoff spot, and losing him for any part of the final seven games would be crushing.

As would losing Schenn's first-line center and the team's captain, Claude Giroux, who appeared to have suffered his second concussion within a span of five weeks during Saturday's 2-1 loss to Arizona.

Instead, Giroux was back on the ice Monday night, cleared by a physician in Arizona despite closing his eyes for a few seconds after the hit, at least suggesting a momentary loss of consciousness.

Asked if that occurred after skipping the morning skate, Giroux said at first that he was "fine," but adjusted his self-prognosis quickly.

"I was a little shaken up," he said. "But Jimmy did a good job to make sure I got off there and make sure I'm OK."

To be clear, Jim McCrossin, the Flyers' trainer, did his job. He got to Giroux, got him to the quiet room, where a physician employed by the Coyotes determined he had not suffered a concussion.

But to be clear also: Any loss of consciousness, no matter how brief, is considered to be Grade III - the most severe level - by the American Academy of Neurology. "If you black out, that is concussion," Keith Primeau wrote in a text response to me during Monday's game. "You may not suffer any post-concussion symptoms but that is clearly head trauma."

Primeau's repeated concussions, which aborted his career just two seasons after putting the Flyers on his back and within a game of the Cup finals, might have been avoided with more diligent medical attention and longer recovery times.

Last summer the NHL followed the NFL's lead in requiring an independent concussion spotter to be stationed in the press box for each game in addition to the one employed by the club. The move came with a cost-cutting loophole, however. The team could opt to use the league's spotter instead - and often does.

But whether club-hired or league-hired, the spotter, without medical training and high above the ice, is hardly a game changer. With five skaters aside, head trauma is less hidden than amid a football scrum.

Here's another thing the NFL no longer does that the NHL still does: Rely on physicians employed by the team to make the call on a concussed player.

In the NFL, that physician is a league employee.

The problem may be that the NHL simply can not afford to do what the NFL does, hiring independent doctors to monitor each of the 1,230 games played in its regular season.

And then there are four rounds of playoffs. That's a lot of doctors. And a lot of dough.

I'm not charging any chicanery here. Just another conflict of interest in an area where professional contact sports can no longer afford to have them. Watching Giroux close his eyes Saturday, watching him wobble to the bench, knowing that he missed three games due to a concussion incurred just five weeks ago - it's hard to believe he was cleared to play two days and one cross-country airplane trip later.

But if we've learned nothing else about concussions through the sagas of players from both the NFL and NHL, from the Kevin Turners and Andre Waters, it is that effects are not always immediately noticeable and repeated concussions within a small window - like five weeks - is repeatedly mentioned when discussing the long-term debilitating effects of concussions.

Nothing in Giroux's play Monday suggested lingering effects of Saturday's hit. He assisted on the second goal, scored the game-winner. He admitted only that the whole team, including him, was tired. As he finished his postgame session with the media, someone from the back of the scrum said his performance "showed us what we know" in questioning him earlier in the day about Saturday's hit.

Really, what it shows is what we still don't know. It's possible that Giroux doesn't even recall whether he blanked out Saturday. Either way, it's impossible to think that's a good thing.

@samdonnellon

Columns: ph.ly/Donnellon