Islanders fans are all too familiar with hip surgery, with Rick DiPietro, Mike Sillinger and Mike Comrie all going under the knife last year and none returning to 100%.

Are hip injuries increasing across sports? Is it related to training focused on strengthening the knees? Or is it a matter of better diagnosis, allowing docs to "fix" problems that otherwise would have been played through and/or rested?

The New York Times takes it for a spin, in one of those "experts are talking, but data is incomplete" stories.

One doc in the story: "I get 40 hockey players in a six-week period at the end of the season all coming into my office with the same-looking bone structure in their hips, all saying that they have been skating since they were 3 years old."