It has been a rough go on the injury front this season for the Habs. I’m not just talking about the on-ice element either; the off-ice communication about those injuries has been, uh, lacking.
GM Kent Hughes indicated a couple of weeks ago that the new policy is to announce the injury and then provide no updates unless there is a significant change in prognosis. We saw this when Oliver Kapanen’s injury was day-to-day for three weeks with nary an update on how it went from day-to-day to out that long. We’ve seen it with Ivan Demidov and Samuel Montembeault who have blown past their original timelines without any update in sight.
On Sunday, the Habs couldn’t even be bothered to announce that Chris Kreider and Josh Anderson were placed on injured reserve. An update on Anderson is supposedly forthcoming but it shouldn’t take a whole day to provide something that could have been put in a press release. If you can announce David Reinbacher’s recall (which they did Sunday morning), you can add how the roster spot was created (Anderson’s placement) in the next sentence; it’s not that hard.
When the team announced Kreider’s injury (they did that earlier this week, at least), they snuck a term in there that they don’t usually use. Instead of saying he’ll miss six to eight weeks, they said approximately six to eight weeks. I suspect that’s included so that if he’s not back by then, they can point to that one-line release and say: ‘See?! We only said approximately,’ and then proceed to provide no update when he inevitably is out for more than eight weeks.
I get the intent here. As fans, we’re not thinking of the privacy element that health information isn’t supposed to be disclosed publicly. The Habs are trying to be protective of their players, both from a privacy perspective and a competitive edge standpoint. And that’s completely fair. But this new approach they’re taking isn’t that at all. Nor is it fair to the fans.
This isn’t the codes to the nuclear football or the secret recipe for KFC breading, things that are heavily guarded and highly secretive. There’s a way to disclose that a player isn’t recovering quite as fast as initially thought without giving away any further injury details that affect the release of protected health information or information that another team could use against them. A generic one-line statement is enough to get that job done. To pretend that doing this little thing is too much to ask or risks giving something away is frankly absurd and insulting.
Fans aren’t asking for extreme details here. But if you can post some nonsensical promotional thing on Twitter that no one has interest in, you can announce a one-line update here and there to provide an update when someone’s going to be out longer than expected. Or have Martin St. Louis relay the information in his daily briefings. That’s not demanding to know too much. That’s asking for the bare minimum and that shouldn’t be too much to ask for. The Canadiens can and need to do better on this front.