Stars' Hitchcock: It's time to stop vague injury updates
Ken Hitchcock is playing the role of trailblazer.
The Dallas Stars head coach believes it's time to stop beating around the bush when it comes to player injury reports, choosing instead to be more forthcoming with pertinent information.
Here's what he had to say on the matter, per The Athletic's Marc Antoine Godin:
I think we collectively hate playing the game. What I mean by that is we say ‘upper body,’ then you go on the phone, and then you look up things or you go to the doctors, find out what part of the upper body. We try to make your work easier, quite frankly, and so we just don’t like going through the dance.
It’s just easy to tell you what it is and let’s move forward. It’s just the whole game. It’s an injury, and within two hours after we tell you it’s ‘upper body,’ you know exactly what it is, so why not just tell you? And the players don’t go out and say, ‘He has a broken left pinky and we’re going to go after the pinky.’ Nobody thinks like that. Our feeling is just tell them what the injury is and move it forward and just stop the dance.
The team has already begun disclosing more specific injury news on social media.