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Remember this?

Still the coolest moment of the Winter Classic festivities was when Lindros set up LeClair for a goal. The ESPN article touches on that day, but mostly it’s about Lindros and concussions:

In a twisted way, that knowledge and the caution it fostered in Eric made him something of an outsider. Nowadays, most hockey fans applaud and defend Penguins star Sidney Crosby for having the guts and perspective to sit as long as he needed to fully recover from a concussion. A dozen years ago, when Lindros tried to do that? The reaction was, shall we say, slightly less enlightened. The media snickered about his manhood and mocked him as a head case. Fans threw pacifiers on the ice. And when Lindros and his parents dared to question the Flyers medical staff after the team first sent Eric to a migraine specialist in March 2000 instead of a neurologist who focused on concussions, the old-school Clarke flipped. He isolated Lindros from the team, at one point going weeks without speaking to his injured star. Then he stripped him of his captaincy.

Looking back, that’s one of the moments of his experience that irks Lindros the most and makes him worry about today’s nonmarquee players: The pressure to play, the alienation from teammates and the other mind games used to get players back on the ice — those things worked on him, in large part because he let them. “The athletes are the worst advocates for this crap by not disclosing enough,” he says. “Who wants to admit deficiencies and put that X on your back? Are you gonna take yourself out? Because now it’s who do they have in the minors to replace you? It’s a sh — y business in that regard.”

Read the full thing here.