Earlier this week, Rick Tocchet told the media that the “odds are against” Filip Chytil playing again for the Vancouver Canucks in the 2024/25 season.
Most times, such statements of long-term injury are made, they lead to inevitable disappointment. But most reacted to this one with a sigh of relief. Why? Because Chytil has a well-known history of concussions. Most folks are thus more concerned with his health and recovery than any impact he might make on the Canucks dwindling changes this year.
But when we say a “well-known history” of concussions, we don’t mean a “well-documented” one. With the way injuries are frequently obscured or outright hidden in NHL circles, determining the exact amount of times someone has been injured, and in which way, can be an exercise in frustration.
Most sources state that this latest concussion, suffered during a brutal hit-from-behind by Jason Dickinson, was Chytil’s fifth – meaning he’d received four others prior to coming to Vancouver.
But determining the date and nature of these previous head injuries proved a little difficult at first glance. So, we decided to do some digging.
As far as we can tell, the first injury of Chytil’s NHL career came at the tail-end of his first full season of 2018/19. It was listed as “upper-body,” but appears to have been a shoulder injury brought on by an attempted hit. It ended his regular season.
A brief lower-body injury occurred in March of the 2020 season but didn’t keep him out of the lineup for long.
A second upper-body injury followed in January of 2021, and it came on an awkward-looking collision with Evan Rodrigues of the Pittsburgh Penguins.
This certainly looks like it could have resulted in a concussion. But it was apparently a hand injury, one that would keep Chytil out of the lineup for more than a month – albeit he also suffered a bout of COVID-19 during that absence, which may have lengthened it.
Our first probable concussion came early on in the 2021/22 season. We could not find a clip of it, but it seems to have come via a hard, accidental collision between Chytil and teammate (and current Abbotsford Canuck) Sammy Blais. This, too, was reported as an upper-body injury, but plenty of whispers at the time identified it as a concussion.
Oddly enough, Chytil would miss little more than a week from this one.
A lower-body injury followed in February of 2022 and then a bout with illness shortly thereafter.
The 2021/22 campaign wound up being an injury-laden one for Chytil. A brief, unspecified UBI occurred in early April 2022 that kept him out for four days. Another followed a couple of weeks later that only kept him out for three days.
Our second possible concussion came during the playoffs that year, in June of 2022. In Game 4 of the Rangers’ Eastern Conference Finals series against the Tampa Bay Lightning, Victor Hedman ran into Chytil in the corner, leaving Chytil looking dazed. He reportedly sat on the bench for a while before heading to the dressing room.
That certainly looks like a concussion. But Chytil would return to the lineup for Games 5 and 6, playing as much as 16:24 in Game 6. The Rangers lost both games and were eliminated, ending Chytil’s season the old-fashioned way.
A second mostly-confirmed concussion came in October of 2022, early on in the 2022/23 campaign. Chytil was hit with an elbow by Columbus’ Cole Sillinger, leaving him wobbling on his way off the ice. This time around, you heard folks reference Chytil’s previous concussion as a reason to worry about this one, but Chytil still only wound up missing about two weeks of time. A lower-body injury and a very brief upper-body injury followed in December of 2022, and Chytil managed to stay healthy from there…until the 2023 World Championships.
With the Rangers eliminated in the first round that year, Chytil headed overseas to represent Team Czechia. But not for long! Chytil suffered a (suspected) fractured cheekbone as a result of a high stick in a game against Kazakhstan, knocking him out of the tournament and putting a serious hamper on his summer training plans.
Anytime someone gets hit in the head hard enough to break their bones, it’s definitely possible that a concussion also resulted from the incident. Throughout the offseason that followed, neither Chytil nor the team specified the exact nature of the injury, only that they were proceeding with caution.
It was serious enough that Chytil sat out the entire preseason that year and that almost all of his training camp participation came in a non-contact jersey. This, in a preseason that occurred some four months after the high-sticking incident.
A fractured cheekbone can be expected to keep a high-level athlete out of action for a couple of months, easily. But four full months, at the end of which the player was still wearing a non-contact jersey in practice? That certainly sounds like something a little more severe, and we’ve probably discovered the origin of Chytil’s third concussion here – at least.
(It’s also possible that there were two injuries at play here and that another occurred during some sort of summer training. It was all kept a little vague. In any case, it seems likely that a concussion was the culprit for the missed time.)
Chytil may have made it back in time for opening night of the 2023/24 season, but it would not be a season to remember for him.
Early in November, Chytil was involved in a fairly innocuous-looking collision with Jesper Fast of the Carolina Hurricanes. Honestly, it was a collision that Chytil got the better of. But Fast’s shoulder or upper arm definitely appeared to connect with Chytil’s chin, and the results spoke for themselves.
This time, Chytil was formally diagnosed with another concussion. Officially, this was his third, but it was probably at least his fourth. And this time, it would keep him out for the entire rest of the regular season.
Chytil did not even return to the ice until January, two months later. Unfortunately, while practicing, he suffered a fall and a “setback,” according to team officials. No one ever came out and said that he was re-concussed in this incident, but it seems most likely, as Chytil proceeded to miss the next four months of action.
But he did return! In the playoffs, no less, and the late playoffs, at that. Chytil returned for the Rangers’ second-round series against the Carolina Hurricanes in the 2024 Stanley Cup Playoffs, and though he missed the next three games after his first with what was described as an “illness,” that does not appear to have had anything to do with his concussions. He returned for Round three and played in all six games as the Rangers bowed out to the eventual champions, the Florida Panthers.
Which brings us to the current season. Proving that November is really not his month, Chytil suffered another upper-body injury in November of 2024 after another unfortunate collision with a teammate. This time, it was K’Andre Miller.
This one had all the markings of another concussion. But given that Chytil returned to the lineup in less than two weeks’ time, that seems unlikely. There just isn’t much reason a team would rush him back, given his history, which makes it more reasonable to assume this was some other kind of upper-body injury. Still, at this point, one really has to wonder.
In any case, Chytil got back into the action. He managed to squeeze one more injury in before his trade to Vancouver, but this one – suffered in a January game against the Dallas Stars – did not feature a collision of any kind and looked more like a UBI of the muscle-related variety.
Chytil only missed a couple of games that time and returned to play his final eight games as a Ranger before being traded to Vancouver on January 31, 2025.
You know the rest. Chytil looked good for the Canucks early on – really good, at times – and just when he really seemed to be building up momentum, Dickinson had to show up to ruin the day. As if he had not cost the Canucks enough already (that being a second- and third-round pick).
Most folks said, at this point, that this was Chytil’s fifth concussion, at least, with the generally-accepted truth being that he had suffered ‘at least four’ before coming to the Canucks. In our little traipse through the past via search engine, we definitely found evidence for at least four concussions (the Blais, Hedman, and Fast collisions, along with that ‘setback’ in practice). But there were also at least a couple of other incidents (the Rodrigues hit, the high-stick at the 2023 WHC, the Miller collision) that also looked like possible head injuries. We imagine that ambiguity, combined with the intentional vagueness with which hockey injuries are commonly described, as the reason why most qualify their count with an ‘at least.’
And in any case, we can probably all agree that whether it’s four, five, six, or seven, it’s a lot of concussions for one brain to have sustained. We’re not here to make any medical proclamations or even to spell doom for Chytil’s young NHL career. We’ll note that players have recovered from multiple concussions before and gone on to have long and healthy careers thereafter. Sidney Crosby is probably the poster boy for this, having suffered at least four concussions between 2010 and 2017 but none since. That’s not the typical experience, but for those looking for hope, it exists in such stories.
More than anything, this history should serve to explain why Chytil’s latest concussion is being treated so seriously – by the team staff, the other players, the media, and the fans, including plenty of Rangers’ supporters who have shared their worries and well-wishes.
It certainly explains why there is little talk of or desire to get Chytil back into the lineup for the Canucks’ (now-futile) stretch run.
At this point, there are concerns far larger than hockey at play.
