Tim Thomas details long recovery from concussion: 'There was a time period … where I hated the game'

With one magical playoff run in the spring of 2011, Tim Thomas — once an afterthought as a 28-year-old NHL rookie —immortalized himself in the halls of Boston sports history, with his name etched next to the likes of Vinatieri, Ortiz, and others.

And yet, despite his efforts to help clinch the Bruins’ first Stanley Cup in 39 years, the 2011 Conn Smythe Trophy winner hasn’t spent much of his retired years relishing his place among the all-time Bruins greats. 

In fact, since hanging up the skates at the end of 2013-14 season, the 45-year-old goaltender had not made a public appearance, opting instead to go off the grid. 

Thomas’ self-appointed exile was not simply a way for the netminder to disconnect from the outside world in search of privacy, however. 

His career batting pucks out of the crease and clearing skaters off the blue paint might be over, but Thomas was still in the midst of a new and much more daunting battle.

“I didn’t want to talk about this,” Thomas told reporters in Washington D.C. on Thursday. “I didn’t want to talk. I didn’t want to tell the world this stuff. Not until I felt ready and I didn’t feel ready yet. But here I am.”



Thursday should have been a day of celebration for Thomas, who was formally inducted into the U.S. Hockey Hall of Fame alongside NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman, Brian Gionta, Krissy Wendel, and Neal Henderson. 

But the road to get to this event — including his first in-person interview with media since 2014 — was one that pitted Thomas against challenges that at one point even made him second-guess what had been a “Cinderella” career in the NHL ranks.

While concussions did not sideline Thomas during his eight years with the Bruins, all it took was one brain injury — suffered while playing with the Panthers in December 2013 — to put Thomas’ life in disarray. 

“I couldn’t keep up with watching a game for at least a few games after I stopped playing,” Thomas told the Associated Press. “In Florida, my last year, at the beginning of December, there was a concussion that changed my life, definitely. … I woke up the next morning after it, and I couldn’t decide what I wanted to eat, where I wanted to go. I couldn’t plan a schedule. I survived by following the team schedule the rest of the year and just made it through that season.” 

Even if Thomas somehow managed to endure through that final season, those symptoms did not subside once he finally opted to retire.

One year after he stopped playing, Thomas opted to get a CereScan — a scan that, as Thomas described, measures the blood flow to the brain by using radioactive isotopes.

The results were startling. 

“Two-thirds of my brain was getting less than 5 percent blood flow,” Thomas said. “And the other third was averaging about 50 percent. So if you can put those numbers and really think through what that means to where I was, that’s where I was.” 

For years, Thomas felt trapped in a haze, struggling to accomplish daily routines and opting to shut himself off from the outside world. But it wasn’t just the media or the general public. 

“I couldn’t communicate with anybody for a few years,” Thomas said. I didn’t call my dad. I didn’t talk to anybody. So there was a time period, yeah, where I hated the game, so to speak. I didn’t get fired up — I didn’t sit there and like, ‘I hate it’. Just my rebound effect was like, this wasn’t worth it. That’s where I was then."

It’s only been a few years since Thomas said that he’s been able to dig himself out of the hole that his concussion and its long-lasting effects put him in. 

Oxygen therapy helped get him back up to speed, while he later credited new measures such as ionized water as being key factors in his return to the public eye on Thursday.

“(It) started to wake me up, I guess,” Thomas said of the oxygen therapy. “I don’t know if that’s the right way to put it.”

Thomas actually made an appearance in D.C. on Wednesday evening, joining Gionta, Wendel, and Henderson for a pregame ceremony ahead of the Washington Capitals’ game against — as luck would have it — the Bruins. 

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While it was only a few minutes both ahead of puck drop and shortly after the final horn sounded in the third period, Thomas relished a chance to interact with many of his teammates that are still mainstays on Boston’s current roster. 

As has been the case with many others in his life, Thomas’ interactions with his Bruins teammates following his hockey career have been rare, to say the least.

“Really good ones,” Thomas said of the conversations he had with the Bruins on Wednesday. “It had been a long time. I hadn’t seen anybody from the teams, well I actually saw Johnny Boychuk once, a few years back, but I hadn’t seen Zdeno or Tuukka or Bergy or Marchy or Krech, so it actually worked out fantastic that Boston was playing the Washington Capitals the night before. 

“Not just them, I got to see the trainers. I had a blast seeing those guys. I was going to say that I enjoyed myself way more than I thought I would, but I knew I enjoyed myself.  I just didn't know how much it would make me feel good to be around those guys again, even just for a short period.”

These days, Thomas acknowledged that he is still not quite back to where he was before these concussion issues arrived around six years ago. There are still plenty of mornings in which Thomas said that he has to "reorder everything" in his mind before getting started with his day.

But when compared to the hell he endured for years, an emotional Thomas could at least admit that he now sees a light at the end of the tunnel.

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"Where I am today is past that and I ended up learning so many lessons out of the experience," Thomas said. "It brought me tighter with my family. It taught me a value for life and a value for my brain that I never had before and I have appreciation for everything that I never had before. I don’t regret anything.”