NO LOVE

By : Mike Rifkin

Last week the NHL announced that teams are no longer required to wear their warmup jerseys on special nights. Those nights include Hockey Fights Cancer, Black History Month, Military Appreciation, and Pride. The NHL has said for a long time that hockey is for everyone, but why ban the jerseys for theme nights? 

Well, if you ask Commissioner Gary Bettman, he said, “I’ve suggested that it would be appropriate for the clubs not to change their jerseys in warmups because it’s become a distraction and taking away from the fact that all of our clubs in some form of another host nights in honor of various groups or causes, and we’d rather them continue to get the appropriate attention that they deserve and not be a distraction.” Last season, Ivan Provorov, Marc and Eric Staal, James Reimer, and others all said wearing the pride jerseys went against their religious beliefs. After seeing several players say no to this, teams, including the New York Rangers, and Chicago Blackhawks, all decided not to wear the pride jerseys or tape on their sticks. Hockey is a great game, but consistently gets in its way with decisions like this. There’s a word that sticks out for me in the Bettman quote, and the word is a distraction. To whom is this a distraction? The players who didn’t want to wear the jerseys made a choice, and that choice has consequences; this is not a distraction for the league. 

The NHL should reconsider this or at least give the players an option to wear the jerseys during warmups; if a player chooses not to wear it, that is their choice. Those actions have consequences, but right now, the NHL has put itself in a bad spot and has no one to blame but itself because if you say hockey is for everyone, you have to mean it.