Hockey: Why Tyler Seguin’s Possible Hip Problems Aren’t Much To Worry About

ESPNBoston published a story on Saturday reporting that Boston Bruins second year forward Tyler Seguin has an “congenital hip condition that makes him more susceptible to a hip injury.” Bruins’ general manager Peter Chiarelli isn’t too bothered by this, telling ESPNBoston‘s Joe MacDonald:

“I don’t want to get into details what we think it is or isn’t and I don’t want any alarm bells going off. Like I said, you can go through our roster and there are probably 12 or 13 guys with something similar or the same thing.”

Welcome to making a mountain out of a molehill.

There are two reasons why any worry about this amongst the Bruins is somewhat unfounded. One, the motion of skating wears on your hips. Be it hockey or figure skating, if you do it long enough, you are more apt to have a hip issue. On the Bruins alone, both goalie Tim Thomas and winger David Krecji have had hip surgery. On the other side of skating, at least two of the last twenty years of Olympic gold medalists in ladies figure skating have had serious hip injuries.

Skating is not necessarily a movement the human body was designed to do, and because of that, there are parts of the body that will suffer from intense use that they were not designed to do. An analogy: Do you use a screwdriver as a hammer? No. If you did, you’d eventually damaged the tip of the screwdriver, because it is not designed to perform a repeated hammering motion. The human body is much the same way. Make it do something repeatedly and intensely that it wasn’t engineered to do, and it will eventually wear.

Therefore, Seguin will not be unique to his sport if he ever has hip issues; he is more apt to have them because his sport involves skating, and skating causes hip issues.

Secondly, many athletes have “congenital” physical issues that they play through. You can’t make news out of every single one. Odds are, there is at least one person on the Bruins who has hypermobility. That is a genetic type of flexibility that can make you more susceptible to injury because your joints can easily move in ways they should not. I have it. It made me a good dancer and gymnast, but it made me a horrible runner, because my knees can slide in ways they shouldn’t, and be pounded on in positions that they shouldn’t be pounded on. The instance of this in the general population is such that there are tons of people with it, and it usually doesn’t materialize into anything. In fact, it helps you be successful in several sports.

So is ESPNBoston and the rest of the hockey media going to next sniff out the Bruins player with hypermobility and make that a story? No, because it doesn’t really matter. Athletes get hurt. It’s a way of life. We can hypothesize all we want, but Seguin could easily be sidelined tomorrow by an injury completely unrelated to his hip. He could be boarded. He could be slashed with a skate blade. He could trip over a teammate. The odds are good that Seguin will some day get hurt – but the odds are good that any hockey player, any athlete in fact, will some day get hurt.

That’s the cross they bear for making a living in a physical sport.