Exit The Warrior, Chris Simon

Ex-NHL Enforcer Takes His Own Life, Dead at 52. Are we paying attention yet?

Over the last 48 hours or so, news has been trickling out of Canada that Chris Simon, a veteran of 15 NHL seasons and 782 games in the league has committed suicide at the age of 52. Simon leaves behind five children from his two marriages.

It goes without saying that it’s a tragedy that he’s gone too soon. It’s also clear that it’s an end that anyone who watches the league closely saw coming for a long time.

Over all the years I’ve watched the Washington Capitals, I saw a lot of Simon, and hockey fans in the DMV saw him at his best. He spent parts of seven seasons in Washington after being traded from the Colorado Avalanche after the team won their first Stanley Cup in 1996, the franchise’s first season in Denver. And in Washington, he’ll always be remembered as one of the members of the team that took the Capitals to their first Stanley Cup Final in 1998. Last night during Washington’s 7-3 loss to the visiting Toronto Maple Leafs, they held a moment of silence in his honor. The broadcast team from TNT took note of the moment on air, but they left a lot unsaid.

Listed in media guides at 6’3” and over 230 pounds, Simon was a big, bad dude. And while he was a classic enforcer, he compiled more than 250 penalty minutes in a season three times in his career, he wasn’t a goon. Simon could flat out play hockey, and was never better than in the 1999-2000 season when he scored a team-leading 29 goals for the Capitals. Often sharing the ice with gifted offensive talents like Peter Bondra and Adam Oates, Simon’s presence tended to create a lot of room for his linemates in the offensive zone, something the Caps poked fun at in a commercial.

But playing a physical game takes a physical toll. He only played a full season of 82 games once in his career. When Simon’s stint in Washington ended after being traded to the Chicago Blackhawks, it followed a winding road across the NHL wherever a team could use his unique skill set. After Chicago, he did two stints in New York, one with the Rangers and another with the Islanders. He made it to the Finals with the Calgary Flames again in 2004, before playing his last NHL game with the Minnesota Wild during the 2007-2008 season.

But wherever Simon went, trouble followed. Over his NHL career he was suspended eight times for a total of 65 games. He was docked three games in 1997 for throwing a racial slur at Mike Grier of the San Jose Sharks, one of the league’s few black players. To his credit, Simon didn’t just face the media, he got on a plane and apologized in person to Grier. He was suspended 25 games in 2007 for a stick-swinging incident involving Ryan Hollweg of the New York Rangers. And finally, he got a 30-game suspension later that year after he stomped on the leg of Pittsburgh Penguins winger Jarkko Ruutu with his skate blade.

Chris Simon by Андрей Чудаев is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

But the road didn’t end there. Simon, who had a family to support, played another 168 games in Russia’s Kontinental Hockey League (KHL), where he was a two-time All-Star. After playing for a pair of KHL clubs in Moscow, he last took to the ice in 2013 at the age of 41 for Metallurg Novokuznetsk in southern Siberia.

The next time we heard from Simon was in 2017, when he filed for bankruptcy. Although he made $15 million during the course of his hockey career, the court filing claimed that Simon was $500,000 in debt, unable to pay child support and living on welfare and disability payments. The court documents claimed that Simon was suffering from chronic traumatic encephalopathy and in the reports over the last few days, Simon’s family made it clear they believed it contributed to him taking his life.

When asked about Simon’s death, NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman and his top lieutenant, Bill Daly, expressed the appropriate amount of sorrow while giving a lawyerly answer about whether or not spending a career launching your body like a missile into other players might contribute to brain injury. For those of us who have watched and played the game all of our lives, the answer seems clear, even if some observers will continue to insist that the science isn’t settled.

I don’t believe that the game of ice hockey can ever be made safe. The plain truth is that if there was a way to make it so, we wouldn’t want to watch or play. So what can we do? Perhaps over time the game will evolve, and with proper monitoring, players at risk of permanent brain injury can walk away from the game before it’s too late. We can also provide them the sort of support they need when the cheering stops and the human body begins to break down. Commissioner Bettman’s signature achievement during his tenure running the league has been to make it more profitable than it has ever been. He’s a capable man, and one would hope he would make the case to the league’s owners that they need to address this question today, rather than wait till they’re forced to by the courts and an angry public.