THE NHL AND PERFORMANCE ENHANCING DRUGS

This article prompted a conversation with the ice hockey-playing sibling(henceforth known as IHPB). His insights into the matter are more beneficial than mine (snark: though, of course, as a blogger, don't doubt that I'll share my own thoughts as well).

IHPB clearly says, in hockey-player speech, as well as his own natural bluntness, that Dick Pound is a "know-nothing douchebag," or the very near equivalent. Yet rather than expound on Dick Pound, IHPB offers one reason why professional hockey players could choose to take performance-enhancing drugs.

Primary Reason: IHPB explains that performance-enhancing drugs aid in recovery time. "When you're playing four games in seven nights," he explains, "and you've been thrown into the boards countless times by six foot four 230/240 pound guys, your body gets abused." IHPB explains that certain types of performance-enhancing drugs aid the body in recovery time and allow players to work out the same muscle groups repeatedly to maintain the strength and muscle necessary to endure a long season. Not all steroids, IHPB says, fall into the same stereotype of making players adding too much weight, and IHPB says he doesn't doubt that a small minority of professional hockey players do use performance-enhancing drugs "but nowhere near the percentage in baseball" or certain other sports.

In addition to offering the explanation that hockey players could benefit from performance-enhancing drugs in order to aid the body's recovery time, IHPB also notes that it's likely a very specific type of hockey player who would be taking performance-enhancing drugs. IHPB is certain that professional superstars are not taking performance-enhancing drugs, and he is likewise sure that goalies (where flexibility is so important) have little to gain from performance-enhancing drugs and thus don't partake. IHPB sees "enforcer-types as well as borderline fourth line players" as those players most likely to be taking performance-enhancing drugs. Old-style power forwards (e.g. ones who couldn't skate), as well as enforcers who don't have much skill aside from fighting, and players who take the body but provide little else to the game, are seen by IHPB to be the "1 to 2 guys per team" who could, possibly, be using performance-enhancing drugs.

Given that perspective from someone who's been playing hockey for nearly as long as he's been alive, I must now add my own thoughts (snark: the thoughts of a mere blogger). I don't doubt that certain hockey players have used performance-enhancing drugs. Yet, like IHBP, I also believe that those hockey players who have abused performance-enhancing drugs to be a small minority of NHL hockey players. I also firmly believe that, due to changes to the game in the new NHL, that the NHL players who could benefit from performance-enhancing drugs are a dying breed.

IHPB pointed out that many current fourth line players (at least on good teams)do not fit the stereotypical mold of unable-to-skate and just-bang-the-body. In today's game, even fourth line NHL players must be able to skate and keep up with the play without resorting to old-NHL interference tactics that were once unenforced. Likewise, in today's game, even the mold of a power forward is changing. A power forward, in addition to being able to stand in front of the net and create space, must be able to skate and skate well. Even the old-school shutdown defenseman, who once merely had to take the body, must be able to skate and skate well in the new NHL. All of these changes to the overall NHL game necessarily make it less likely that NHL players would use performance-enhancing drugs--as the NHL players who once would have most benefited from such drugs are less and less likely to find a place in the new NHL.

On the whole, like IHPB, the NHLPA, the NHL, and unlike Dick Pound, I don't believe that performance-enhancing drugs are a major problem in the NHL or are ever likely to become a major problem in the NHL. Most hockey players are like IHBP in that they work out devotedly, use old-fashioned therapeutic devices such as Advil, ice, and Icy-Hots when healing their sore bodies, and watch their diets in order to ensure they maintain weight and muscle mass. Like IHPB, most professional hockey players are in great shape, but like IHPB, many also have body builds, when seen off the ice, that make it obvious, "There is no way he is juicing!" While professional hockey players, unlike still-amateur IHPB, have access to fancier therapeutic devices such as cortisone shots, etc., the fact of the matter remains that most hockey players do not need to use performance-enhancing drugs. Goaltenders don't need steroids, and neither, really, do hockey stars who eat right, train right, and have access to legal devices that help to aid recovery time.

To be frank and honest, I think it's more likely the NHL would have a problem with too many alcohol abusers than with too many player using performance enhancing drugs. (Caveat: As previously noted, so long as drinking doesn't negatively impact a player's on ice performance and so long as players never get behind the wheel of a car while impaired, I accept that hockey players can drink with the best of them.) E.g., alcohol abuse will become the NHL's main drug problem before steroids ever do, and reckless on-ice and off-ice behavior is probably of more danger than either steroids or alcohol. Whether Dick Pound likes it or not, that's the nature of the sport of ice hockey, as seen from those who, unlike Dick Pound, have some knowledge of the sport that is ice hockey.