The NHL Cleared Him Four Times. Then He Died.

Añadido: 2026-05-06

[00:00:00]Steve Montador absorbed at least 15 documented concussions across his NHL career. Four came in 12 weeks with the Blackhawks. Each time the team cleared him to play within a day or two. He was 35 when they found him in his Missaga home. His son was born 4 days later. The medical records from those 12 weeks took a decade to surface. What they showed changed everything. Steve Montador grew up in Missaga. Born in Vancouver, raised on rinks, he played four junior seasons across three OHL teams, North Bay, Erie, Peterborough, and put up 174 points in 251 games. Decent numbers for a defenseman, but the number that got him noticed was 429.

[00:00:52]That was his penalty minutes. In junior hockey, that's not a side effect. That's an audition. No NHL team drafted him.

[00:01:01]Not a single one. He signed with Calgary as a free agent on April 10th, 2000 and started in the American Hockey League with the St. John Flames. He helped them win the Calder Cup in 2001. By November of that year, he was in the NHL, making his debut against the Buffalo Sabres and recording an assist in his first game.

[00:01:23]And the role was clear from the start.

[00:01:26]Steve was not there to score. He was there to protect the players who did block shots, kill penalties, drop the gloves when someone needs to answer for a hit on a teammate. He was the guy who made the room work so the skilled players could do their jobs. During Calgary's 2004 Stanley Cup run, he scored the overtime winner in game one of the Western Conference Final against San Jose. Even his best moment on the score sheet came in the middle of a war.

[00:01:58]Six teams wanted that from him over 11 seasons. Calgary, Florida, Anaheim, Boston, Buffalo, Chicago. 571 regular season games, 87 penalty minutes, 69 documented fights. Every number on that sheet tells the same story. a man who traded his body for his livelihood and a league that accepted the deal without hesitation. What makes this harder to hear is what people said about him off the ice. Patrick Sharp called him a leader in the locker room. Luke Adam, a younger teammate in Buffalo, remembered how good Montador was to him as a rookie. Haley Wickenheiser, the Canadian women's hockey legend, called him one of her dearest friends and described him as a beautiful soul. for me. I mean, most recently, uh, the death of Steve Monto, who was one of my best friends.

[00:02:56]>> He wasn't an outlier. He wasn't troubled in a way that made him easy to dismiss.

[00:03:02]He was warm, thoughtful, dependable, exactly the kind of person you'd want in your life. He supported the Right to Play charity and traveled to Africa to work with children through their programs. He served on the NHLPA's bargaining committee during the 2012 lockouts. He cared about things beyond the game and the NHL asked that person to absorb damage for a living. Steve signed that deal thinking the cost would be his knees, his teeth, his shoulders, the usual wear. Nobody told him the real price was being tracked somewhere else entirely. Somewhere he couldn't see until it was too late. CTE doesn't arrive like a broken bone. There's no snap, no swelling, no moment where everyone in the building knows something just went wrong. It builds quietly. Each concussion pulls something out of an account that never fully comes back. And each subconussive hit, the ones nobody logs, the ones that don't make anyone miss a shift, chips away at what's left.

[00:04:13]Steve Montador's brain absorbed at least 15 documented concussions across his career. 15 times his brain hit the inside of his skull hard enough for someone to write it down. But thousands more impacts were never recorded.

[00:04:28]Practice collisions, board battles, fights where nobody checked on him afterward because he skated to the bench under his own power. His father, Paul, later said in court filings that Steve sustained thousands of subconcussive brain traumas and multiple concussions, many of which were undiagnosed and undocumented.

[00:04:48]After Steve died, Dr. Charles Tater of the Canadian Sports Concussion Project examined his brain at the Kremble Neuroscience Center in Toronto. Tater had studied the brains of 16 former professional athletes at that point. He said the CTE he found in Montador's brain was present in multiple locations and was extensive.

[00:05:12]His exact words, there wasn't just a touch of this problem. He had definite CTE.

[00:05:19]He described the damage as both extensive and florit. He added that the damage would have continued getting worse had Steve lived longer. Tater also noted the presence of abnormal phosphorolated towel protein in multiple areas, the kind that only appears when there has been trauma to the brain. For context, Tater's team also examined the brain of John Forzani, a 67-year-old former CFL player. At the same time, Forzani had also suffered multiple concussions during his career. His brain showed no signs of CTE. The researchers couldn't explain why. Genetics and individual susceptibility might play a role, but the results told a clear story. Steve Montador at 35 had brain damage that a man 30 years older did not.

[00:06:13]That finding, as devastating as it was, didn't surprise the people closest to him. They'd watched the symptoms for years. the depression, the memory loss, the erratic behavior, the days he couldn't get out of bed. His father, Paul, described watching Steve's executive function deteriorate.

[00:06:33]He was very forgetful. And then his decision-making was erratic and illogical and exaggerated. Paul told CBC, "They just didn't have a name for what was happening yet." But here's where most people telling this story get it wrong. They frame everything that happened to Steve as a consequence of his choices. He chose to fight. He chose to play. He chose to keep going. And all of that is technically true. What gets left out every single time is who was signing off on those choices. Who looked at the medical file, looked at the player, and said, "You're cleared. Go back out there." Because someone did repeatedly. And the paper trail says exactly who. The 20112 season is where the paper trail stops being deniable.

[00:07:25]Chicago had just signed Steve to a 4-year 11 million contract. For a player who'd spent his career bouncing between teams as a depth defenseman, this was the biggest commitment anyone had ever made to him. He had every reason to stay on the ice and the team had every reason to keep him there. He appeared in 52 games that season, scored five goals, and added nine assists. Then the concussions started stacking. In the space of 12 weeks, Steve was diagnosed with four separate concussions. The lawsuit his family later filed documented four specific instances where team medical records show he was cleared to return within 1 to two days of each diagnosis.

[00:08:12]Not weeks. Not the gradual return to play protocol the league talks about in press conferences.

[00:08:19]Days, one to two days, four times in a row. This isn't a policy debate about what the league knew in 1997 or what some committee recommended in 2004.

[00:08:31]This is one team, one medical staff, and one sequence of decisions about one player's brain. His season ended after the final one. He required almost a full year to recover. During the 201213 season, he played just 14 games for Chicago's AHL affiliate, the Rockford Icehogs. And even that was against explicit medical advice. Team Dr. Michael Terry had told Steve in January 2013 that he was still under playing restrictions and should not engage in any contact at all. should not even work out if any symptoms appeared. In February, Steve told Dr. Terry he'd been working out with other players and had participated in contact activities.

[00:09:16]Anyway, Terry told him he'd done this expressly against the Blackhawks medical direction. The NHL later used that fact in court that Steve had defied restrictions while never addressing why the team had cleared him four times in 12 weeks just months earlier. A psychologist Steve met with during that period, Dr. Jennifer Mueller, noted in a medical record that Steve himself believed continuing to play could be detrimental to his health. He played anyway. The Blackhawks bought out the remaining two years of his contract that summer. No NHL team offered him a deal after that. He was 32 and his career in the league was over. When Paul Montador's wrongful death lawsuit reached Cook County Circuit Court, a case that began in federal court in December 2015 and was scheduled for trial a decade later, the NHL's defense was not that they didn't know about the risks. Their argument was more specific than that. They said Steve had been warned. That team neurological consultant Dr. Elizabeth Purith had explained the science of multiple concussions to him. That Dr. Terry had concluded he understood the long-term dangers and that the NHLPA had educated players about CTE during preseason tours. Their 2023 court filing put it plainly. Steve was told by multiple specialists that he should stop playing hockey due to his concussion history, but he ignored those professionals and continued his career. The league's answer to a man dying at 35 was that the man had been informed and the choice was his. What that position requires you to accept is that a player who had just been cleared by his own team's doctors four times in 3 months was simultaneously making a fully independent, fully rational decision to assume those risks. The institution doing the clearing bears no responsibility for the clearing. Steve's estate refused the $18.9 million class settlement in 2018 that closed the case for 318 other former players.

[00:11:31]Each of those players received roughly $22,000.

[00:11:35]His former Blackhawks teammate Daniel Carcillo and Boston's Nick Boon also refused.

[00:11:42]Steve's father Paul looked at that number and kept going alone. After Chicago, Steve had no team, no routine, and a brain that was starting to confirm what he already suspected. He signed with Medvak Zagreb, a Croatian club playing in the KHL for the 2013-14 season. 11 games, three assists. Then his body stopped cooperating and he was done. He was 33, living back in Missaga with no one checking on him. the way a team would. His best friend in hockey, Daniel Carcillo, watched it happened from a distance. They'd become close during their one overlapping season in Chicago. Carcillo had been battling painkiller abuse at the time, and Montador, himself, a recovered alcoholic who had quietly checked into rehab during the 2006 Olympic break, helped him get sober. with my recovery and uh and had a really hard time um you know getting over it uh on my own. But Steve was uh a huge help.

[00:12:48]>> The bond was real. They spent Christmas together after Carcillo was traded to the Kings. And even then, Carcillo could see the change. He was always forgetting his phone or his keys. Carcillo recalled, "He didn't really look you in the eye when he was speaking to you or hold your gaze like he used to. It just looked like he was hurting. In Ken Dryden's 2017 book, Game Change, Carcillo described what Steve was doing in the hours he spent at a Starbucks near his home with his laptop open. He was reading everything he could find about CTE, researching the disease that was taking him apart. Carcillo's words, he was researching concussions and what was going to happen to him because of them.

[00:13:35]And the more knowledge he gained, it seemed the worse he got, realizing maybe that he wasn't going to reverse the symptoms and the memory loss and the headaches. Carcillo saw the other signs when he visited. Steve had made an extra set of keys for the same lock because he kept forgetting where he'd put them.

[00:13:54]>> You know, just recently going home to Missaga and to his home and seeing the number of uh sets of keys he had for, you know, the same lock. the days he'd stay in bed with the blinds drawn because the headaches were too much. A friend described Steve's existence as split between good brain days and bad ones. On good days, he'd reach out to his family and friends, sounding sharp, sounding like himself, and everyone would be reassured. On bad days, he disappeared.

[00:14:26]He knew what was going on with him.

[00:14:28]Carcillo said he had all those extra sets of keys made. You don't do that if you don't know something. Steve had been sober for nearly 10 years during his playing career. But without the structure of a team, without a schedule, a purpose, a reason to stay disciplined, he started drinking again. Without two drinks, there were 10. The disease and isolation fed each other. On February 15th, 2015, Steve Montador was found unconscious in his Missaga home. He was 35. His brother Chris told reporters that Steve simply stopped breathing or his heart gave out. No foul play was suspected.

[00:15:13]An official cause of death was never released to the public. 4 days later, his girlfriend gave birth to their son, a boy Steve never held. Three months after that, the Canadian Sports Concussion Project confirmed what everyone close to him already knew. His brain showed widespread CTE. He had arranged to donate it to the Kremble Neuroscience Center before he died. He already knew what they would find.

[00:15:43]Steve's father, Paul, chose to carry the fight forward. Not the one Steve started. Steve never filed a lawsuit, but the one his death made unavoidable.

[00:15:55]Paul told CBC in 2020, "His intention, and therefore my intention and the family's intention in continuing with the court case, is to make a difference in the NHL and hold them accountable for the lack of attention that they've paid to this matter." He refused the settlement. He kept going for 10 years alone against the largest professional hockey organization on earth. He is still going. The league's position is that Steve Montador understood the risk.

[00:16:28]What they never explain is why understanding the risk was his job, but managing it wasn't theirs. Drop a comment. Should team doctors who clear concussed players carry personal liability? If this one hit different, a super thanks goes a long way toward keeping these stories coming. Subscribe so you don't miss what's next. It drops soon and trust me, you'll want to see it. And don't forget to check out our new site as sportsandscars.com.