So . . . as it tends to happen, my plans have been foiled. I had intended to make all of this week's posts about chance, and then as chance would have it a news story occurred that was impossible for me to ignore (I'll get back to luck and chance soon enough). I'm talking about a story that is on the front page of The Globe and Mail's main section, sports section, and business section. A hockey player got hit in the head.
I'm oversimplifying and diminishing of course (he was concussed and fractured a vertebra). This at a time when the NFL and NBA are reviewing the impact of concussions on their games, when another hockey player (Penguins star Sidney Crosby) has been convalescing for two months due to a concussion, when there are predictions from writer Malcolm Gladwell (who wrote about concussions here) that concussions will cause professional football to cease operations within fifty years. NHL commissioner Gary Bettman's (non-)response flies in the face of this trend, although he does has a business argument (that without hits, fan interest would drop) if not a moral one.
The blogosphere is full of commentary today on whether or not Chara should get (or have gotten) suspended for his hit on Max Pacioretty, but that's not what I'm interested in. I, as you may already know, am interested in the impact of outcomes. What I want to know is whether the rules should be based on the injury, or the event causing the injury. People who know far more about hockey than I do (i.e. my students) have claimed that the hit itself on Pacioretty was not that bad, that it was not a dirty hit; it just happened, based on where Pacioretty was on the ice, that such a bad injury was sustained. Far worse, illegal, and dirty hits that have not caused injury were not severely penalized, but in this case the outcome was so dramatic that action is being called for (by fans, commentators, and sponsors).
In the NBA, simply leaving the bench area to run (for example to help out a teammate in a fight) is cause for suspension, even if no punches are thrown. The NBA is so worried about another incident like the brawl in Detroit several years ago that they try to punish the events leading to negative outcomes, in addition to the outcomes themselves. Taking this to the NHL, this would mean that any hit that could cause a concussion or broken neck/back/spine would need to be illegal, which of course is not what the NHL wants to do.
But we tend to weigh things by outcome, not intent. The law is set up to most severely punish murderers, not attempted murderers, even if was only by chance that the attempt failed. Having the intention to commit a crime, and even taking steps to that end (e.g. casing a store and buying supplies to aid in a burglary) are not illegal until the burglary is attempted.
This is especially tricky when you consider, as Gladwell reports in his article, that it is not necessarily the hardest hits that cause concussions - it could be a build-up of previous hits (that could have even occurred in practice) and a relatively light hit causes the trauma. So the event immediately preceding the negative outcome may not even be the most damaging, yet it is the perpetrator of this event that would be most harshly punished. From a probabilistic standpoint it makes more sense to punish those events that are most likely to cause serious harm, regardless of the outcome. This is particularly true if the intention is to stop injuries like Pacioretty's.
But I think there would be an uproar if punishments were doled out for events that did not lead to bad outcomes. Even in the NBA the punishment is harsher if you take a swing at someone and connect than if you miss (even if it's only luck that determines whether you smacked him or not). As the title of this post says, without injury there should be no penalty. Which is a system that is designed to ensure that harm will eventually and consistently come.
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