from John Branch of the New York Times,

In his final three seasons playing in the National Hockey League, before dying last year at 28 of an accidental overdose of narcotic painkillers and alcohol, Derek Boogaard received more than 100 prescriptions for thousands of pills from more than a dozen team doctors for the Minnesota Wild and the Rangers.

A trove of documents, compiled by Boogaard’s father, offer a rare prescription-by-prescription history of the care given to a prominent, physically ailing athlete who struggled with addiction to some of the very drugs the team doctors were providing. The scores of prescriptions came before and after Boogaard’s entry into the league’s substance-abuse program in September 2009 for an addiction to painkillers and sleeping pills.

Among the findings:

• In a six-month stretch from October 2008 to April 2009, while playing 51 games, Boogaard received at least 25 prescriptions for the painkillers hydrocodone or oxycodone, a total of 622 pills, from 10 doctors — eight team doctors of the Wild, an oral surgeon in Minneapolis and a doctor for another N.H.L. team.

• In the fall of 2010, an official for the Rangers, Boogaard’s new team, was notified of Boogaard’s recurring abuse of narcotic pain pills. Nonetheless, a Rangers team dentist soon wrote the first of five prescriptions for hydrocodone for Boogaard after he sustained an injury.

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