Okay, it's 1.30, and our next session, as I said, will be with Bill Daly, the Deputy Commissioner of the National Hockey League, who's been kind enough on holidays to spend the next 30 minutes with us. So, as I said, Bill's the Deputy Commissioner and Chief Legal Officer of the National Hockey League. He's been with the NHL for just under 30 years, and really has overseen major international hockey agreements, collective bargaining, and he has a law degree from NYU and did his undergrad at Dartmouth. I think, you know, working on a few of the league's committees over the years, I think I found Bill to have really an amazing ability as a non-medical person to synthesize all the medical information and really ask really good questions to the team docs, the therapists, and he also has assembled a very good both legal and medical team with the NHL, with Julie Grand, Jamie Hacker, Winnem USA, and Kim Harmon. So, Bill, thanks for joining us. Can you hear us all okay? Yeah, I can hear you, Garren. Thank you for having me. I apologize for the kind of unprofessional background. I happen to be in a car, but I'm not driving, so people can feel assured that I'm safe, and other people are safe. Yeah, no, thank you for having me, Garren. I'm happy to be here. Perfect. So, we're going to start off, you know, I have three main topics I'm going to chat with Bill about, and he'll spend about five minutes or so on each topic, then we'll open the field to questions. So, the first one is, Bill, can you talk a bit about the approach that the NHL has with respect to, you know, player equipment and the playing surface, playing environment, and how you guys have approached that over the years? Yeah, for sure. Obviously, it's becoming more of a focus of our health and safety committees, and I think that's probably a good thing. I think 10 to 15 years ago, our primary concern with player health and safety had to do with the behavior of the players on the ice, and I think to a large extent, due to the efforts of the Hockey Operations Department, player safety, our Department of Player Safety, and our alignment with the National Hockey League Players Association, I think we have largely removed serious concerns about player conduct on the ice, vis-a-vis one another. We see it from time to time, and I'll get to it later, I think, in the talk, but that shift in the way the game is played on the ice, and it being safer today than it was 15 years ago, has led us to, or allowed us, really, to transition to looking at other elements of the game, and things that are important to injury and injury prevention, and I'll take a step back. I mean, I think our current framework for injury diagnosis and management works through, you know, the joint committee that we formed with the NHL Players Association as a product of our 2012-2013 collective bargaining negotiations, and it starts with what I'll call an umbrella committee, which is our joint health and safety committee, which kind of includes, really, a potpourri of different skill sets. Obviously, there's NHL participation and NHL representation, representative participation on that committee, NHLPA representatives on that committee. Then there's, and Dieron, you alluded to them, we have retained our own medical people, starting with Winnemosa, who's worked with us probably for 15-20 years now. More recently, Kim Harmon and Ruben Echimendia, who is a co-chair of our concussion subcommittee and is our neuropsychologist on the Players Association side. Scott Delaney joined the Players Association maybe a year and a half ago, two years ago, took over for John Rizos, who continues to consult and participate on some of the committees as well, and Paul Comber, who works with Ruben as a co-chair on the concussion subcommittee. Under that joint health, and in addition to the medical representation we have on that committee, we also have representation from team medical, team doctors, athletic trainers, in some cases equipment managers, depending on the subject matter of the committee. We have general managers, team general managers who are engaged on these health and safety committees and attend the meetings on a regular basis, and we have coach and assistant coach representation. Typically, the coach is filled by an assistant coach or maybe a retired coach or a coach between jobs, but they've played a role as well. Underneath the joint health and safety committee, there are, I think, nine standing subcommittees, and that number grows over time and has grown over time. That includes the longest standing medical committee we have, which is our concussion subcommittee, which meets regularly four times a year to discuss the current state of conditions for concussions around the league and what's causing them and how we're dealing with them. We have a medical standards committee. We have an electronic medical records committee. We have a prescription medication committee. We have a protective equipment subcommittee, which was the initial question, and I'll get to, and we have a playing environment subcommittee. The last two committees are ones that are very active currently, just in terms of trying to get our arms around risk factors associated with playing the game related to equipment and player equipment, but also relating to the player environment and things we can do to improve the player environment, soften the player environment, make it more player-friendly. In terms of our protective equipment subcommittee, obviously, we rely on the efforts of our equipment managers to kind of log and keep track of all the equipment being used in our locker rooms by our players. Equipment, for the most part, other than certain standards they need to reach or meet is totally a player choice matter. The players choose which equipment feel the best for them and serve their purposes, and there's always a trade-off between protection and performance, as you might imagine, and that's a balance that the players ultimately make themselves. We've also retained a biomedical or mechanical engineering firm, David Gashu with the firm of ARCA, has worked with us for the better part of a decade, more than a decade, currently tests for and ranks the protective qualities of various pieces of equipment, most notably skates, and as new models of skates come on the market, we try to update that testing. Also, player helmets, which is our current focus now, and a new testing method that David has gotten approval to conduct on player helmets and their protective qualities, and then on goalie masks as well. In the past, we've done tests on gloves and the protective qualities of gloves. All that information is taken, and while we don't have the ability to change the design or the way our manufacturers manufacture those equipment, we communicate back the information to them. As I said, we rank the equipment by their protective quality. We also feed that information to the clubs and to the players so that they're aware of what they're wearing and the qualities and perhaps demerits of some of the equipment they choose to wear. I will say that we've been doing this probably about five years now. I think we're starting to pick up some traction with the manufacturers. I think they are being responsive and receptive to making improvements, maybe the low-hanging fruit, but improvements nonetheless. I think our equipment is getting more safer and more protective over time. Obviously, club personnel can play a big role. While they can't dictate to players what equipment to wear, they certainly can play a big role in encouraging and recommending usage of certain types of protective equipment. The protective equipment that has been focused on most publicly recently are cut-resistant equipment. This is something that's been on our radar for quite some time. Rod Pazma of our hockey operations group has taken a personal interest in increasing player usage of cut-resistant equipment. In some instances, skate cuts can be considered rare, but they also can be catastrophic. I think everybody is starting to recognize that and respond to it in a positive way. We've had cut-resistant socks in our league for probably 10 to 15 years now, and I think that's pretty standard usage among our NHL clubs. We've been pushing wrist and arm protection, cut-resistant protection, for a couple of years now. While we have not mandated it as a league and don't have the players' support to mandate it, at this point in time, we've certainly increased utilization pretty significantly over the last couple of years. This past year, we produced an educational video that was kind of mandatory for our players to witness and watch during the training camp prior to the 2023-2024 season. During the course of this season, as most of you probably know, there was a tragic fatality in a British professional hockey league game with a skate cut to the neck. As a result of that, there has been a surge of effort and support towards making neck protection certainly strongly recommended, if not mandatory. At this point in time, it has become mandatory. It has been legislated by all the major hockey organizations with the exception of the Continental Hockey League in Russia and our league. We do have a pending proposal to the Players' Association to make mandatory neck protection usage by our players. That proposal was reported on by the Players' Association, as I understand it, this past summer at the player meetings. While the players have not indicated approval of moving forward with that mandatory rule, it certainly remains on the table. I think they're going to continue to work through their educational efforts to make players understand and recognize the importance of neck protection. Only a couple of words, because I'm probably over my five minutes that Darren gave me on this subject. On the playing environment, it is what you would think it is. It's making sure our ice conditions in each of our 32 arenas is as high quality as possible so that players aren't suffering injuries from bad ice. That certainly can happen. More recently, we've been testing the flexibility boards and glass systems. We are finding that the predominant amount of our concussions are from contact with the environment and boards and glass around the perimeter. Making this as soft an environment as possible is important. We also have instituted in our arenas several standards related to the playing environment, whether it be removal of benches so that we can respond to emergencies in the bench areas or trauma areas and proximity of trauma areas as well as the staffing of trauma rooms and the like. All under the guise of improving the playing environment. Those are some of the things we're doing through the committee process. That's great, Bill. We basically did a great job of just outlining the detail that the NHL does in their subcommittees. One of the subcommittees you mentioned is the concussion subcommittee and it's the longest standing committee. For those of you who watch hockey and I know as a team physician, sometimes we will get what they call a mandatory concussion evaluation by a spotter. As a team physician, you have to bring the player back and go through the NHL's version of the SCAT. Maybe, Bill, if you can just comment on maybe a bit about that spotter program, how it evolved and how you think having that extra set of eyes is helpful for the team medical staff. The genesis of the spotter program was a study that we in the Players Association undertook with respect to whether we could identify visible signs of concussion on the ice or at least red flags that we could use to assess the possibility of concussion, whether there was a scientific way to connect some of those visible signs to the eventual diagnosis of concussion. It was a multi-year study where we had hockey people coding events in every game of a season. We did it historically, so not on a real-time basis, but we had people who came in and watched 20 games a day to look for visible signs of concussion. I think the results of that study was reported back to the concussion subcommittee. The concussion subcommittee then created a visible signs kind of system where if certain things are spotted on the ice, there's a response in one of two ways, either a mandatory removal for the player for a mandatory concussion evaluation off the ice in a quiet place or discretionary removal, and we can get into a little bit more about that. Obviously, mandatory removals, we dictate in cases of a player lying motionless on the ice, possibly unconscious. Motor in coordination is an automatic mandatory referral. Blank and vacant looks by players that are observed by on-ice personnel is a mandatory removal. And then we have a hybrid one with slow to get up following a hit to the head or torso, which is one of our more recent mandatory removal obligations. Discretionary removal are in the case of clutching the head or helmet or holding the head or a helmet or standard slow to get up type situations where a player may be staying down for a variety of reasons, one of which may be a head injury, but there may be other injuries suffered by the player in certain cases, and there may be just an attempt to draw penalties, which still happens in our game. In terms of what that means in terms of the mandatory and discretionary removals and mandatory case, it's clear that the player has to be removed from the bench area. In the discretionary case, we allow club medical personnel, usually in this case trainers, to do a mini screen in the bench area to be satisfied themselves that no head injury has been suffered. Obviously, a little trickier and not perfect. The whole system's not perfect, but it's a lot better than what we had. In terms of how we spot these things, we go about spotting these things. We have in arena spotters in every arena that monitor every game. These are actually off ice officials who are employed by the league and who are trained in visible signs of concussion. We also have an employee for what we call central spotters who work out of the player safety department in the league office. They also watch every game.

Bill Daly

NHL

player safety

equipment standards

international hockey agreements

collective bargaining

injury prevention

medical information

joint committee

concussion subcommittee

protective equipment

biomedical engineering

cut-resistant gear

ice conditions

concussion spotter program