They call him Rain Man.
The reference is to the 1988 Dustin Hoffman-Tom Cruise movie and the character Raymond, who could tell you how much snow fell on a January day 20 years ago or could recite the telephone number of a person he just met, all thanks to studying the telephone book each night.
The tag comes courtesy of National Hockey League senior vice-president Colin Campbell. The 29 other league general managers think it's funny, and Darcy Regier, general manager of the Buffalo Sabres since 1997, doesn't mind at all.
When it comes to concussion talk, Regier is hockey's equivalent of Raymond, who liked to dare people to drop a box of matches on the floor so he could instantly calculate how many spilled.
"I don't have an accounting background," the 54-year-old former defenceman says on a sunny day as the NHL wrapped up three days of talks on the head injuries that have plagued the league this winter. "But if I'm trying to figure something out and I don't have a context for it, I usually end up gravitating toward numbers."
The NHL is closing in on 100 concussions this year, almost all of them caused by the collision of two players.
"We average probably 45 hits in an NHL game," Regier calculates as he talks. "And there's 1,230 games in a season, so that makes up somewhere in the range of 50,000 hits."
Regier is the NHL's leading dove, one of three general managers who speak openly of banning all hits to the head (the others are the Pittsburgh Penguins' Ray Shero and Carolina Hurricanes' Jim Rutherford). Regier is also one of a larger group who argued, successfully, for the steps taken so far: last year's Rule 48, which banned blindside hits, and this year's decision to have a doctor rather than a trainer determine the seriousness of a hit to the head. They also led the push for this week's decision to begin calling more boarding and charging penalties next season.
"For me," Regier says, "the goal is to eliminate concussions. I could say, 'Reduce those 100 to 20, or to 10,' but the goal should be to eliminate entirely. I think ultimately we have to take a 360 approach [full protection from all sides]to protect the head.
"So, in a perfect world, I would like to be able to go in and just pull out those 100 concussions from the 50,000 hits and say, 'Okay, now we're at 49,900 hits and we haven't changed the game. You're missing 100 hits and we have eliminated all the concussions, and we didn't hurt the game.'"
He knows, however, that this is dreaming.
"It's not practical," Regier says. "It's not possible."
There will always be accidental injuries. Players run into their own teammates. Players fall and strike their heads on the ice. Fighting remains a part of the game despite arguments in favour of banning it.
"That probably means we're not getting to zero," Regier says. But that is not to say that the goal of elimination is lost.
"The question is, to what extent can we manage it?" he says. "By this I mean where are most of these hits happening? Where on the ice? Is it close to the boards? Is it a result of charging? Is it a result of the [back-of-the-net]trapezoid, meaning that the goalies don't come out to play pucks any more? Is it a result of having taken the centre line out?"
He saw, as lately all have noted, how the game changed after new rules were implemented following the 2004-05 lockout. By calling obstruction, the game sped up, which led to more violent collisions, which led to more concussions.
"I've been around long enough," Regier says, "to know that if we don't do the work and the studying, when we make changes, you might get lucky enough to hit that which you've tried to change - you might. But you can be guaranteed that there will be a lot of side effects, or unintended, unexpected consequences. So, for me it becomes really important that someone has to do a lot of work."
Regier's passion for studying cause and effect comes from personal experience. The native of Swift Current, Sask., suffered his first concussion as a junior playing for Prince Albert when he lost a fight in Regina and found himself sitting in the penalty box without the slightest notion of where he was. The coach sent Regier and backup goaltender Roland Boutin to the dressing room, where Boutin kept asking Regier where he was and Regier couldn't answer. "I can remember sitting there guessing," Regier says. "I was certainly conscious, but I had no idea where I was. And Rollie thought that was the funniest thing. He would repeat the question, 'Do you know where you are?' and I kept guessing. They had a lot of fun with it.
"Next day I was back at practice."
That, of course, was standard treatment for concussion in those days: laugh it off, shake it off.
Regier turned professional and bounced around the minor leagues for years as part of the New York Islanders' organization when the Islanders were a dynasty. He appeared in a handful of NHL games. When he joined management - first with the Islanders and, in 1997, becoming general manager of the Sabres - he had first-hand experiences with two of the game's best-known concussion situations. First was with the Islanders, when Brett Lindros, younger brother of Eric, was forced to retire at 20 after a series of concussions.
"It was scary," Regier says.
In the second instance, he traded Pat LaFontaine to the New York Rangers from Buffalo when the Sabres' medical staff recommended that the star player should call it a career after so many concussions and LaFontaine believed he could still play. He went to New York but soon was forced to call it quits.
The concussion that really brought it all home for Regier, however, had nothing to do with professional hockey, but was a blow that passed by all but unnoticed in pee wee hockey. Regier's son Jarrett was excelling in both tennis and hockey until, seven years ago, it all changed.
"He was very competitive," Regier says of his third and youngest child. "And one day I noticed he wasn't competing. He was small and ended up playing against bigger kids. His response when I was trying to understand why he had lost his competitiveness was 'Dad, I don't ever want to feel like that again.' It was a concussion he was dealing with.
"As a parent you immediately move to 'Wait a minute, is this worth it?' In his case, hockey was his secondary sport, not his primary sport. His primary sport was tennis. At that point I started really to try to understand how badly he wanted to play hockey, because in my own mind I didn't think it was going to be worth him dealing with that."
Jarrett dropped out of hockey and is, today at 18, a promising young tennis player. Since that moment, Regier has tried to read everything he can on concussions and their aftermath.
"I had no idea of the magnitude," he says.
He also believes that the hockey world, in particular the NHL, has no true sense of the overall effect of increased concussion awareness and the tsunami of public opinion that has risen up in recent weeks.
"We're in a world now where people are voicing their opinions," he says. "People recognize that they have a voice and they're taking the responsibility for that voice. It might not all be rational, it might not all be objective, but the one-person one-vote thing has become a lot more real than it used to be.
"So I wonder what that means for things like our sport? Does it more strongly connect our society with our sport, and our responsibility back to it, however that might be interpreted?"
While he did not get what he had hoped for in this week's meetings, he remains convinced that at some point the NHL will move to penalize all hits to the head, accidental or not.
"I've seen a shift in general managers over the years," he says, "which I think is to try to understand more, to be more collaborative in nature, to be less confrontational and not to take a stand on a line in the sand."
In discussions with hockey people at the junior ranks, he says there is a growing sense that this ever-flowing mass of information and opinion is having an impact. Parents are telling the traditionally physical junior hockey world that, "If you're not going to look after the well-being of the players, their fathers, and probably to a greater extent their mothers, are going to have them go and play in an equally competitive and safer environment." It could mean college hockey, it could mean another sport.
Regier says he and many other NHL leaders are acutely aware of their responsibility to the game as awareness concerning head injuries grows and public opinion shifts. It affects his everyday job.
"It's a huge deal," he says. "It is very big and it impacts a lot of areas. And that's why it's critical that we spend a lot of time on it and pay a lot of attention to it. And get it right.
"We need to get the concussion right and get the care right and get the player back playing.
"First of all, though, there should be no concussion if it can be prevented."
Roy MacGregor