As other pro sports leagues halted Wednesday, the NHL arrived a day later
While players in other professional leagues decided not to play Wednesday night in the wake of the Jacob Blake shooting, the NHL was an outlier: it proceeded almost entirely as normal in its Toronto and Edmonton bubbles.
By Thursday, the Hockey Diversity Alliance — a group of current and former Black NHL players — had convinced enough of its fellow players to join athletes in other professional leagues and sit out Thursday and Friday’s games.
This was a major development for the NHL, a league where what little protest Black players have tried has gone almost entirely unsupported by their white teammates.
And it was an abrupt change from Wednesday, when there was an anodyne “moment of reflection” before the Boston Bruins-Tampa Bay Lightning game in Toronto, but its planned counterpart in Edmonton apparently never happened later that evening. Then both games were played as scheduled.
“I don’t think we should be here,” Kelly Hrudey, an analyst for Canadian broadcaster Sportsnet, said before the Tampa-Boston game.
“I feel sick to my stomach we’re actually doing this game,” Sportsnet’s Christine Simpson said during one intermission.
In recent years, several NHL players of color have attempted to call attention to injustice without the visible support of their teammates. When J.T Brown — son of N.C State football great Ted Brown — raised his fist during the national anthem in 2017, he did it alone on the Lightning bench.
Earlier this month, Minnesota Wild defenseman Matt Dumba gave a speech and kneeled during the anthem before a qualifying-round game between the Edmonton Oilers and Chicago Blackhawks and one Black player from each team put a hand on his shoulders. Vegas Golden Knights forward Ryan Reaves did the same two days later, and three white players — teammate Robin Lehner and the Dallas Stars’ Jason Dickinson and Tyler Seguin — kneeled with him.
“You can’t keep coming to the minority players every time there’s a situation like this,” Dumba said in a radio interview Wednesday. “The white players in our league need to have answers for what they’re seeing in society right now, and where they stand.”
So while the protests in the NBA, WNBA, MLB and MLS were all player-driven, NHL players on four teams chose not to follow their lead Wednesday. Boston’s Zdeno Chara said “it was so close to our game.” Colorado Avalanche center Nazem Kadri, whose teammates had a few extra hours to deliberate before the late game in Edmonton, said “it crosses your mind when you see other leagues doing something like that.”
Carolina Hurricanes captain Jordan Staal said Thursday that it was hard to imagine what he or his teammates would have done if they were still playing amid what he called a “hard situation.”
“I know the feeling walking into the arena, going into a big game and what the focus is on,” Staal said. “There’d be no question I’m sure there would be guys talking about it. Yeah, it’s a hard situation obviously. But it would be hard. Yeah, it would be very hard. I don’t really know what I would feel if I was in that situation, what those players went through, if they talked about it a ton or they left it alone or what the scenario was. My focus is on the game when I’m walking into that room, that’s No. 1. So who knows what happened, but it’s obviously a very hard situation.”
But late Wednesday night, three Philadelphia Flyers players reached out to HDA member Chris Stewart, and on Thursday more than 100 players on the eight teams still in the NHL’s bubble cities joined Dumba and San Jose Sharks forward Evander Kane on a conference call, TSN and the Athletic reported. That led to the decision by the players to sit out Thursday.
It took that kind of external push to provoke that kind of reaction from NHL players unaccustomed to such activism in a league that’s almost 95 percent white. As Hurricanes forward Jordan Martinook acknowledged Thursday, much of this was new territory for players like him.
“I think everybody’s just trying to make our way through this, trying to learn,” Martinook said. “Obviously six months ago I probably wasn’t fully aware of it. Probably most people weren’t. It’s terrible the way we’ve had to learn about it but it is the way that we have. The NHL is in the same position.
“Obviously the NBA went the way it did and the NHL is probably, definitely they’re going to have to address it. We’ll see where they take it. Obviously, I think the way that I can, I have a son that I’m definitely going to try and teach the lessons that I’m learning daily about this to him. ... It’s definitely a hard situation to gravitate around. We’re all just trying to do our best.”
This story was originally published August 27, 2020 at 1:21 PM.
