While the NHL and the NHLPA may or may not be making significant progress toward saving the season, hockey rages on abroad. Hopefully I'll have reason to stop doing these posts soon, but in the meantime, here's your second weekly KHL fix.

TMZ—of all places—is reporting that Derek Boogaard's family will sue the NHL Player's Association for the money left on the enforcer's contract when he died in May 2011 (as well as some punitive damages). The family says that the NHLPA was supposed to help them collect the remaining balance, but didn't.

Fighting! Few serious fans of hockey think it doesn't have a place in the sport. But then, no serious fans think this bullshit belongs either. How, then, to separate the meaningful fighting for legitimate purposes—enforcement, deterrence, stimulation—from fighting for fighting's sake? The OHL has an idea: force the…

Hockey doesn't show up on a toxicology report. The coroner will tell you that it was too much alcohol and too much oxycodone that stopped Boogaard's heart on an early morning last May, and the NHL will tell you the same. But it was hockey that caused Boogaard to turn to pills, hockey that caused him to need them…

CTE. Scourge of the human brain. Recent cause célèbre that confirms that, no, evolution didn't design our heads to be beaten in repeatedly for 15 years. It's coming for our athletes one by one, whether or not they put themselves in harm's way.

This is Derek Boogaard, younger, still the same player.

Try to justify the institution of the enforcer in hockey to an outsider, and you'll likely pull out the usual arguments. It's about protection, about fear, about retribution. So yes, on a basic level, it's about pain. But it's never, never about injury. So with two players still out in the wake of a one-goon rampage,…