[taco.vidal]

Originally Posted by SuperMatt18

He shouldn't even have been playing in training camp.

Sieloff is getting thrown under the bus but really the hit wasn't that bad. Probably shouldn't lay out a teammate but I guarantee the coaching staff was telling these guys to treat the scrimmage like a real game and you don't want to be cut.

This is bang on. The Sens staff including doctors should be investigated. Here is an article from March 2016 where MacArther explains how bad his symptoms were at that point in time from the earlier concussions. He also mentions how he hid his symptoms from the team and doctors at various points in time.

Before he got cleared for training camp, did he hide further symptoms? Did the doctors conduct thorough examination that would have identified problems even if he was hiding them? Did the doctors see red flags but cleared him anyway because the team wanted him cleared?

Its also the second concussion hes gotten from a hit from a teammate.

Read the article and you'll see his problems were severe well before the hit from Sieloff and he helped get himself into this bad situation. The NHL should take a closer look at how this was handled. Focusing the blame on Sieloff and his hit on a team mate in a scrimmage seems like an attempt to divert attention from the real issue here.

http://ottawacitizen.com/sports/hock...th-concussions

Clarke MacArthur opens up about his gruelling battle with concussions

KEN WARREN, OTTAWA CITIZEN
More from Ken Warren, Ottawa Citizen
Published on: March 27, 2016 | Last Updated: March 29, 2016 10:12 AM EST

For weeks, he needed toothpicks to keep his eyes open. For months, he endured “stinging” headaches. He couldn’t watch TV. He couldn’t read. He couldn’t focus on anything — including his wife, Jessica, three-year-old daughter, Emery, and now 10-month old son, Gus — for more than five minutes at a time.


The initial estimates of being out for only 10 weeks came and went with little improvement. When he did make his first tentative steps at returning in January, it felt like he was “floating around” on the ice.

MacArthur expects no sympathy. He says he created his own nightmare, ignoring telltale concussion symptoms at the end of training camp.

“I feel like if I had just went with my gut instinct from Day 1, I would have missed 10 games and I would have played the rest of the year,” MacArthur said in an exclusive interview with Postmedia at his Ottawa home last week. “It would have been a different situation. It could have been a completely different year.”

Instead, he looks back — in painstaking detail — about his long months of inactivity and uncertainty.

THE BIG HITS

In September, MacArthur was full of confidence, believing the team “was ready to take some big leaps”. Any concerns about the February, 2015 concussion he suffered following a collision with goaltender Robin Lehner were history by the time he scored two goals in six playoff games against Montreal in the spring.

Everything changed in the final game of the pre-season. MacArthur was backchecking, aiming to stop Montreal’s Alex Galchenyuk, as Senators minor-league defenceman Mark Fraser stepped up to “strong arm” the Montreal forward. Galchenyuk dodged the hit. MacArthur didn’t. The hit to the jaw was jarring.

“It stunned me, it was like the (concussion) before and I was thinking ‘oh, no,’” MacArthur said. “I went to the bench, trying to hide it almost, but the trainers saw it.”

MacArthur heeded the medical advice to remain out of the game, but the following day he made his first big mistake, thinking the five-day lag until the regular-season opener would allow him enough time to recover.

“I woke up and I could feel it coming on,” he said. “I had a headache and my vision was a little off. I was telling the trainers and doctors that I was fine, but I was hiding the symptoms.”

MacArthur passed the concussion test, but his normal one-hour afternoon naps had turned into five-hour sleeps. He occasionally woke up in “a fog.” He made it through the opening three games of the season, knowing something was off.

“I would get a couple of passes and think a guy was on me and I would try to move it, but I had, like, 10 feet of room,” MacArthur said. “I was stumbling around and I think my balance got tweaked a little bit. How do I bring it up that I’m not good now? I already told them that I was. I had to figure it out before everyone catches on that I can’t even play.”

Then came the Oct. 14 game in Columbus. MacArthur says he was ready to come clean, “feeling off and on” after taking a solid first-period hit. “I was going to let them know after the game.”

He didn’t last that long. In the second period, he tripped over a Columbus player, banged his head on the ice and has no memory of being helped to the dressing room. The next thing he remembers is a doctor giving him an eye exam.

“I puked in the trash can five minutes afterwards and I’m thinking, ‘what did I do?’”