If you’ve been paying attention to the major headlines coming out of the National Hockey League (NHL), you have seen the name Jack Eichel a lot recently. Eichel has been the subject of much debate over the last six months, and in that time has been called everything from stubborn to whiny to selfish. To string together exactly how we got here, to an ongoing violation of personal and medical autonomy, and identify why this lose-lose situation is getting worse for everyone involved by the day, the story has to start back in 2015, at the NHL draft.
Jack Eichel was eighteen when he was drafted by the Buffalo Sabres second overall in the 2015 NHL Entry Draft, just one pick behind current captain of the Edmonton Oilers and hockey phenom Connor McDavid. While fresh draft picks, particularly those still in their teens, usually spend some time developing with their drafting organization’s minor league affiliate or with a college team, Eichel was signed immediately to the Sabres, where he scored his team’s only goal of the night in his first game on NHL ice. He continued to perform well that year, but this was not enough to keep the Sabres from ending his first season twenty-third out of thirty in the league. In Eichel’s second season, they were twenty-sixth out of thirty. In his third year with Buffalo, three things happened. The NHL expanded to thirty-one teams, Eichel was named captain of the Sabres, and the Sabres finished the season thirty-first overall in the rankings. Over the next two seasons they finished at twenty-seventh and twenty-fifth out of thirty-one.
So there we have it, the status quo: Jack Eichel is a very good player on a very bad team. Despite having been intermittently plagued by injury, Eichel’s standing among experts on this sort of thing hasn’t really changed. He’s still cited as being a generational talent, along with likes of his fellow 2015 draftee, McDavid. Going into the 2020-2021 season, he was twenty-three years old, the vast majority of his career still to come.
Then, six months ago, something happened. On 7 March 2021, Eichel was checked into the boards by New York Islanders centre Casey Cizikas. Even in the first seconds after he straightened up from the collision, it was clear there was something wrong with Eichel’s neck. He continued to be in visible pain on the bench, and though the Sabres initially denied he had been seriously injured, he was declared indefinitely sidelined less than a week later. By mid-April, the prognosis was reported across major sports news outlets; Eichel had a herniated spinal disc in his neck, and he would likely require surgery.
Eichel wanted surgery. Eichel’s doctors, an independent second opinion he sought outside of the organization’s approved list, said he needed surgery. Eichel’s team said no.
The prescribed treatment from the Sabres and their medical staff was twelve weeks of rest and physical therapy to get Eichel back into playing condition. The twelve weeks of rest passed without much update, and shockingly did not clear up Eichel’s herniated spinal disc. Surgery became at that point inevitable. Throughout the course of those weeks, Eichel was never anything but completely upfront and vocal about his desire and intention to get surgery and complete his recovery in time to be ready for training camp in the fall of 2021. Now that his team was on board with that idea, that should have been the end of the discussion. It wasn’t.
There were two surgical treatment options available for Eichel. He could receive either a spinal fusion or an artificial disc replacement. In a fusion surgery, the affected disc is removed and the discs above and below it are fused around an insert. This addresses the symptoms caused by the herniated disc’s infringement on the patient’s nerves, but removes all range of motion in the impacted area and requires additional surgeries at regular intervals for the duration of the person’s life after. Artificial disc replacement involves removing the affected disc and replacing it with a device that simulates the organic disc’s function. This also addresses the symptoms caused by a disc herniation, but preserves the range of motion, and reduces or possibly eliminates the need for future surgical intervention. Eichel wanted an artificial disc replacement. The Sabres were insistent that he have a fusion performed.
Spinal disc fusion would mean further surgeries for the rest of Eichel’s life, and involve serious consequences for the quality of that life, the ramifications of which would touch every corner of it, far beyond merely his ability to play NHL hockey. Disc replacement has outcomes that Eichel and his doctors have decided are better for him, the person whose spine is under debate. The Sabres do not like the idea of disc replacement. It has never been performed on a professional hockey player, and there is potential that it could impact Eichel’s ability to continue to play, and to play at the level that the Sabres drafted, signed, and are paying him for. Eichel is their guy, and they want their money’s worth out of him.
While it’s true that the procedure is untested on professional athletes playing contact sports like NHL hockey, it is not at all an untested or experimental procedure. It is reliable and well documented, and is increasingly becoming preferred by neurosurgeons over fusion in terms of long-term patient outcomes. It is also the plan recommended by the doctors that Eichel has chosen to trust with his care. Throughout meetings and discussions going over the options and outlining each side’s perspectives, however, neither camp budged. The Sabres simply would not allow Eichel to have the surgery he and his doctors decided on.
The stalemate that followed has essentially frozen Eichel in time. He’s been locked in place, seriously injured, in pain, and unable to play the sport he loves with no end in sight. This is a position he has been forced into by his team, a team he gave the last six years of his life to. How is this even possible? It’s possible for one very simple reason. Jack Eichel does not hold the rights to make decisions about his body. The Buffalo Sabres do.
Everything that is happening right now in Buffalo is happening because of a clause in the NHL Players’ Association’s collective bargaining agreement that states that while a player is permitted to seek a second opinion from a doctor outside of their team’s approved list, the final say on any treatment plan will remain with the team physicians. This means that, under the NHLPA’s CBA, sole deciding power on an NHL player’s injury treatment plan is in the hands of their team. This level of control and veto capability over a player’s medical decisions is unique to the NHL among North American professional sports—and I read the CBAs of the NFL, NBA, and MLB to check.
With the standoff between Eichel and the Sabres showing no sign of resolving, a trade seemed to be the inevitable outcome. All summer there was debate about where he was going to land. It even came up during a Twitter Q&A with former Sabre and current Vegas Golden Knights goaltender Robin Lehner, who when asked where he thought Eichel was “going,” responded, “Hopefully to surgery to get his neck fixed.” The Buffalo front office had lofty opinions about what they needed to be paid in order to part with the player they rested so much of their hopes on, however, and no team in the league was willing to meet their sticker price for a damaged star with an uncertain future. The longer Eichel’s surgery was delayed the more out of practice he got, the lower his trade value was driven, the less likely it was any team would deal for him. No trade took place, and Eichel reported to Sabres training camp last month.
On 23 September, Eichel failed his training camp physical and was promptly stripped of his captaincy. The justification provided was that they needed a captain who could serve in the position and being on long-term injured reserve (LTIR) made Eichel unsuitable for the job. This is not an expected standard by far. Several times over the last decade or so there have been teams whose captains were on LTIR for significant stretches of time. At this very moment the Montréal Canadiens are poised to begin their season with their captain, Shea Weber, indefinitely placed on LTIR with little likelihood of return. It’s difficult to see the Sabres taking the captaincy from Eichel as anything but the organization punishing him for refusing to be forced under the knife for a surgery he does not want, when there is an alternative sitting right there.
Eichel is twenty-four years old. Putting aside the rest of his career, the rest of this young man’s life is ahead of him. Forcing him to live with an incredibly painful, debilitating injury because he doesn’t want pieces of his spine permanently fused is a reprehensible response from the Sabres. He is a person who is entitled to autonomous rights over his body and what is done to it. In the words of aforementioned former teammate Robin Lehner, the first major NHL voice to speak out strongly in defense of Eichel, in a Tweet that was liked by Eichel, “we know we can get injured. But sure as hell hoped our employers wanted what’s best for us and not just think about the sport. We are humans too and wanna live a healthy life.”
There is no legitimate, ethically defensible reason why this decision should belong to anyone but the doctors that Jack Eichel has selected to consult and, ultimately, to Eichel himself. It is after all, in the most literal sense possible, his neck on the line.