New Jersey Devils general manager Tom Fitzgerald is making changes on the rink after his son’s neck was sliced by an ice skate during a hockey game.
“They rushed him right into the locker room. All we got was, ‘The bleeding is under control and he’s on his way to the hospital,’” Fitzgerald, 56, said in an interview with ESPN published on Tuesday, March 18. “And they had a team of 12 or 14 people waiting for him when he got there. My wife was a mess. But I was cautiously optimistic because he had stayed on the ice. I don’t wish that on any parent.”
Tom’s son Casey Fitzgerald is the captain of the Hartford Wolf Pack which is an NHL developmental team for the New York Rangers. During a December 2024 game, Casey got tied up in a play. While the injury wasn’t apparent at first, when Casey was getting off the ice an opposing player pointed out his neck was bleeding.
“They were showing [the play] and there was another angle I was told. I didn’t want to see that angle,” Tom recalled. “The only angle I saw was the one I [previously] watched and you couldn’t really see [the cutting]. The more I talked, the more I started getting choked up a bit just thinking how lucky we are. I’m getting choked up now. It’s tough. I don’t want any parent to go through it. You just don’t understand. You can’t understand.”
Casey ended up getting 25 stitches and made a full recovery. He returned to the rink three days later. While Casey is fine now, Tom has a new perspective. The hockey executive doesn’t want any other parent to go through what his family did.
“We’re very lucky,” Tom shared. “But why the players don’t think big picture versus just, it’s about [their] career today? If they ever thought of their parents watching what we watched, they’d think differently.”
Since the incident, Tom has taken action to help prevent the safety issue. Tom is the sole hockey GM on the NHL’s cut resistant committee. In addition to Tom, the group includes NHL’s Senior VP of Hockey Operations Kris King, VP of Hockey Operations Rod Pasma, members of the NHL Players’ Association and team equipment managers.
As a member of the committee, Tom has helped come up with ideas on how to protect players.
“The first thing I thought about was the chin guard,” Tom explained. “If you can mandate players to at least have the two-finger rule [of coverage below their chins], would a Kevlar chin guard have stopped [the worst of it for Casey]? I don’t know if it would have prevented all of it, but just ideas like that. And there’s a prototype being made as we speak.”
While a lot of the protective equipment is optional for athletes at the moment, Tom has offered the men a perspective from a worried parent’s mindset.
“My message was just, ‘Tell the players you don’t want your parents potentially going through something like this,’” he told the outlet. “[It’s] scary. Put as much protection on as you possibly can because you’re going to stop playing at some point, and you’re going to have to live the rest of your life. So live it.”
