Bubble Vision: What It’s Like Playing in the NHL with a Full Shield

I spoke to NHLers who have worn the bubble this season about the challenges and how quickly they want to take the bubble off.

If you watch the Dallas Stars broadcast closely, particularly on close-up shots of the bench, you’ll notice Mason Marchment often removes his helmet during extended breaks in play.

For Marchment, it’s become a force of habit, a reprieve of sorts while having to play with a full facial shield.

“I think it’s just so I can feel normal for a moment,” Marchment said. “You just take a moment, I think, to breathe without the full shield, I just have to make sure I’m paying attention to put the helmet back on quickly.”

Marchment has been one of the poster children this season for players wearing a full facial shield after he took a puck to the face on Dec. 27 against the Minnesota Wild. He missed the entire month of January, returned to the lineup on Feb. 2, and has since worn the full facial shield in his past 13 games.

For Marchment, the full facial protection is temporary, but necessary.

“The puck shattered my face,” Marchment said. “So it took a long time to recover and feel normal, and while it’s healing, I can’t let it shatter my face again.”

Marchment said he effectively had to “re-teach himself how to breathe” after surgery in late December. Whenever he would get in a high cardio workout, which applies to hockey, he would struggle breathing and it was something, Marchment, said he had to push through to almost “train his face to properly breathe again.”

Once that happened he was able to return to the NHL lineup on Feb. 2 against the Columbus Blue Jackets, he scored in that game, and said he’ll keep wearing the bubble until he gets clearance to not wear it from Stars medical staff.

In a cruel bit of hockey irony, in that same game where Marchment returned to the lineup, Blue Jackets forward Kirill Marchenko took a puck to the face while he was sitting on the bench and broke his jaw.

Marchenko was out of the lineup for 20 days, returning on Feb. 22, and is now playing with full facial protection.

“It was tough, I was still feeling pain for a while, but after seven days of practice I was ready, so give me the bubble, the face can keep healing inside it, right?” Marchenko said. “Then you get back to hockey.”

Marchenko and Marchment are far from the first and won’t be the last players to adjust to wearing a full bubble in the NHL because of injury.

“It’s been 12 or 13 years since you wore a full cage or visor and then you put it on, that’s an adjustment,” Marchment said. “Looking down, finding pucks in your feet, early on that was something that was just getting used to with the bubble on.”

“I think you can’t think about it,” Marchenko said. “If you think about it, you let it distract you, so you find a way to make your brain think (the bubble) isn’t there, and then you just play your game again. But it was, at first, a conversation with your own brain.”

This topic feels particularly notable after Stars forward Roope Hintz took a puck to the face Saturday night against the Edmonton Oilers. Hintz missed Sunday’s game against the Vancouver Canucks and will potentially return to the lineup sooner or later with a full facial shield.

In Dallas alone five players have now been injured by pucks to the face, including Matt Duchene, Mavrik Bourque, and Matt Dumba in addition to Marchment and Hintz.

Dumba spent extended time wearing a full facial shield and said, for him, it was more of an emotional adjustment than a physical one.

“You play your entire life with a full cage or bubble and then you put on a visor, so you can get used to going back,” Dumba said. “But it’s not really the play, it’s the other implication of it. The things you aren’t able to do because you have a full bubble or cage on.”

Players with a full bubble or cage can’t fight, for both health and NHL rule book reasons, and while fighting in NHL has become less prevalent it is still part of the culture and draw for some of the NHL’s mass appeal — remember what happened in USA-Canada at the 4 Nation’s Face-Off?

Over the past two months, I’ve been talking to players who recently wore a bubble or cage in the past two seasons, in this very unscientific study I spoke to 12 players from seven NHL teams.

From that group, which included the three players quoted in this story, there were a couple key takeaways.

• The bubble is more popular than the cage, because going from the visor to the cage is more jarring. This is why Detroit Red Wings forward Tyler Motte, for example, has worn a bubble this season instead of a cage like he wore in college at Michigan.

• Almost all of the players I spoke to about this said that it’s pretty common in-game chirping for a player wearing a bubble or cage to be targeted with questionable language about their lack of toughness.

• Every single player I spoke to said they couldn’t wait to go back to playing with a visor and ditching the full facial protection.

Effectively from a player perspective, the bubble or cage is a medical device that allows you to get back on the ice sooner, similar to a brace on an injured knee, and not something that should be required or should be used at the professional level.

In fact, there were several players who went a bit further, pointing out that college hockey — which requires full facial protection — should go to visors because it would improve the game, potentially eliminating some of the high sticks and higher hits in the NCAA.

As one player put it, “when everyone is wearing a visor, everyone is more understanding to worry about everyone else’s face.”

Right or wrong, that’s the reality of the NHL. And while there may be some outside opinions that differ, mine included, NHL players are more than happy wearing visors and understand the risk.

“You adjust to it when you get hurt, then when you are ready and healthy you take it off,” Marchenko said. “I think that’s how it should be.”