Pittsburgh Penguins captain Sidney Crosby should have been pulled from Game 6 after crashing into the end boards, and put in the NHL’s concussion protocol for further evaluation.

Except he couldn’t be pulled from Game 6, based on the NHL’s current concussion protocol standards.

“Depending on the mechanism of injury, ‘slow to get up’ does not trigger mandatory removal,” NHL deputy commissioner Bill Daly told USA TODAY Sports. “The protocol has to be interpreted literally to mandate a removal. ‘Ice’ as compared to ‘boards’ is in there for a reason. It’s the result of a study on our actual experiences over a number of years. ‘Ice’ has been found to be a predictor of concussions — ‘boards’ has not been.”

Holy [expletive].

That he wasn’t pulled is an indictment of the League’s concussion spotters system and its criteria; an indictment of the Penguins’ approach to the their players’ health; and the continuation of a disturbing trend in the 2017 Stanley Cup Playoffs in which potential brain injuries are shoved aside for competitive advantages.

Let’s start with the spotters.

The Spotters

Beginning this season, the NHL expanded its concussion spotters mechanism to include not only observers inside the arena, but also ones monitoring games off televisions in New York.

The entire system was dismissed as a PR ploy by some, but the hope was that this was another failsafe in place as players and teams seemingly made their own rules about when a potentially concussed player should leave the ice.

(See Wideman, Dennis.)

The spotters have specific criteria they use to judge whether a player should enter the concussion protocol. In general, the criteria are applied “after a direct blow to the head (including secondary contact with the glass, boards and ice) or an indirect blow to the head (such as a blow to the body that causes acceleration/deceleration of the head).”

Here’s where we observe a failure in this system in the case of Sidney Crosby in Game 6.

This part of the criteria deals directly with an incident like Crosby’s, in which a player is “slow to get up” after potentially injuring his head.

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Take a look at that again: The criteria for the concussion evaluation goes from a broad, sweeping “direct blow to the head” and is boiled down to three specific instances, none of which technically applied to Crosby. Technically, his head hit the boards; and the “secondary contact with the ice” as presented here is very much about it happening after a hit or a punch.

It’s completely semantic and borderline ridiculous, but as Daly noted, there’s a mechanism in the criteria where removal of Crosby on a play like that isn’t mandatory.

Now, let’s recall when Connor McDavid was pulled from a game earlier this season by the spotters:

Said McDavid, at the time:

“It kind of sucks because that’s the rule. You go down, you hit your head, you reach up and that’s the rule. They take you off the ice. I hit my head. Well, I hit my mouth, reached up and grabbed my mouth and they took that as something that it wasn’t. I guess that’s the rule. The guy stuck to the script and did his job.”

And again, the Crosby play:

Are we honestly satisfied with a concussion protocol whose justifiable application depends on whether a player covers his face with his glove momentarily after falling headfirst into the end boards? Or if a player hits his head on the ice rather than the boards?

Because that’s the deal. Just like goalie interference, if the [expletive] rulebook doesn’t completely spell it out, then they can’t call it.

Let’s stay on this criteria for a moment. You know what isn’t mentioned in this document? Context.

This isn’t “Player X.” This is Sidney Crosby, a player with a demonstrable history of concussions, including one diagnosed approximately one week prior to slamming his head against the boards on Monday night. Should there be a provision in the criteria that deals with “at risk” players?

Story continues