[Drake]

It contends that the N.H.L. is responsible for the physical trauma and brain damage that Boogaard sustained during six seasons as one of the league’s top enforcers, and for the addiction to prescription painkillers that marked his final two years.

“To distill this to one sentence,” said William Gibbs, a lawyer for the Boogaards, “you take a young man, you subject him to trauma, you give him pills for that trauma, he becomes addicted to those pills, you promise to treat him for that addiction, and you fail.”

In 55 pages of detailed accusations, the suit does not seek specific damages to be awarded to Boogaard’s parents and four siblings. It asks that a trial jury determine “a sum in excess of the minimum jurisdictional limit” for each of eight counts in the suit.

While this Boogaard lawsuit is broadly aimed at the N.H.L., it details the care that Boogaard received from specific team doctors of the Rangers and the Minnesota Wild, and the co-directors and a primary counselor of the league’s Substance Abuse and Behavioral Health Program, which oversaw Boogaard’s care after he entered rehabilitation while playing for the Wild in September 2009.

The lawsuit notes that Boogaard played in 277 N.H.L. games over six seasons and scored three goals. He fought at least 66 times on the ice and, according to the suit, “was provided copious amounts of prescription pain medications, sleeping pills, and painkiller injections by N.H.L. teams’ physicians, dentists, trainers and staff” to combat the injuries and pain he endured.

The suit also says that Boogaard was prescribed 1,021 pills from about a dozen doctors during the 2008-9 season with the Wild. At the end of that season, after operations on his nose and his shoulder, doctors prescribed Boogaard 150 pills of oxycodone over 16 days, the suit alleges.

It states that the N.H.L. “breached its duty” to Boogaard by, among other things, failing to monitor his prescriptions or establish proper procedures for administering and tracking them. It alleges that the substance-abuse program knew that Boogaard violated its rules many times — including a series of failed drug tests in his final months and his admission that he sometimes bought painkillers illegally — yet never disciplined or suspended him, as program rules dictate.

The lawsuit also says that the N.H.L. should have known that “enforcers/fighters” had increased risk for injuries, concussions and addiction.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/13/sp...-nytimes&_r=1&