Yesterday morning, a 21-year-old Ontario hockey player died following three weeks in a coma.

Don Sanderson played for Whitby Dunlops of the OHL, and fell into the coma after hitting his head during an on-ice fight.

Waking up to this news on Friday left me with a sense of despondency not only because of the death of a promising guy who was younger than myself, but because I could foresee the knee-jerk reaction that could potentially change the game I love for no logical reason.

The media backlash did not disappoint.

Almost every piece of coverage implied that changes to the rules of professional hockey were not only warranted, but desired.

In terms of logical thought, this is ridiculous.

First of all, hockey is a dangerous sport.

It is full-contact, played on ice, and necessitates skate blades, sticks and dense pucks of vulcanised rubber.

Not one single person enters into this sport thinking he or she will not get hurt: that's a given. They also know the risks involved, even the unlikely ones. Hasn't everyone involved with the game seen the Clint Malarchuk video a thousand times?

I'm not in any way trying to imply that if a player gets injured it is their own fault; my point is that in such a volatile sport, people know injuries will occur, and yet they still enter into participation.

Injuries simply are part of high-impact sports, some serious, and if players were entirely uncomfortable with this, they would not play.

Fighting in hockey is the same; players known the dangers, and they do it anyway.

Secondly, it is wholly irrational to change the way a sport is playing because of one incident.

Think about how many fights occur in the NHL; lets say, for the sake of averages, that there is one per game. So two players engage in roughing for every game that is played in the NHL. That's at least two guys having a scrap almost every night in a regular season.

How many NHL players then have died as a direct result of an on-ice altercation?

One.

Bill Masterton of the Minnesota North Stars died in 1968, two days after a check which floored him, causing him to hit his head on the ice.

This was a decade before the 1979 draft, when helmets became mandatory for any new player in the league, and since then, no other NHL player has died in such a way.

In fact, in the whole history of the NHL, only four players have died of head injuries sustained whilst playing; Owen McCourt, Edgar Dey, Bill Masterton and Paul Fendley.

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