On Thursday, right at the end of business and within five minutes of each other, the NHL and the NHL Players Association put out press releases. This was a co-announcement of the possible return of the five former Canadian junior players acquitted over the summer of sex-assault charges.
The announcement came about 24 hours into this generation’s Kennedy assassination. There isn’t a lot of excess online umbrage to go around right now.
Oct. 15 is one week into the season. People will already be busy declaring that the Edmonton Oilers are finished and that Connor McDavid is 100 per cent going to sign with the Leafs.
NHL says players acquitted in Hockey Canada sexual assault trial can return to league
December is long time after October. Who has the stamina to complain about the same thing for one-and-a-half months? The U.S. declared financial war on us six months ago. That war is ongoing, and Canada’s already back to whinging about real estate.
You have to hand it to the NHL. It has played this one cleverly. It has disavowed the players when the anger was hottest. Around then, NHL commissioner Gary Bettman called them “these players that we inherited.” From whom? A rich aunt?
The league said nothing during the court process. Once all five were cleared, it kicked the can down the road a couple more months for a “review.” And now that all the steam’s burned off, it has outsourced its marketing and HR functions to the average hockey fan.
The NHL may be signing the work orders, but you’ll be the one making the big decisions.
Let’s say your team hires one of these guys. What are you going to do about that?
If you feel there is an ethical stand to be taken here, that is on you to follow through with. This isn’t 2021. An angry tweet isn’t going to do it. If you want to make a point, you’re going to have to leave your couch to make it.
Between the concussion crisis, the anthem crisis, the kneeling crisis, this crisis, and every other sort of crisis, leagues cannot help but have learned some sociology. To wit, people will say one thing and do another.
In the past three years, a lot of outlets have done stories about hockey’s culture crisis. That’s the word always used – “crisis” – which suggests potential collapse.
I’m looking at the NHL. Broadcast deals are booming. Top pros are back in the Olympics. The 4 Nations Face-off was the biggest Canadian sports story of the year. People are still packing arenas.
If this is what bottoming out looks like, I wish someone had offered me a piece of the action.
In the manosphere, the Hockey Canada trial’s not-guilty verdict is viewed as a vindication
As a result of all their forced market research, leagues are shifting out of the morality business, which means they are divesting from the crisis business. Critics call it a crisis. The league calls it an opportunity for its customer to turn the channel. Except they don’t.
Obviously, leagues would like their players to be good citizens. For a long while, they thought that included a quasi-parental responsibility. When one of your charges does wrong, they believed the paying public wanted to see the league offering correction.
That became an endless game of whack-a-felon. Then accusations became synonymous with convictions. Leagues couldn’t keep up. Which is when a funny thing happened – nothing.
No one stopped watching basketball or soccer because somebody who played those games did a terrible thing. Even if the league did nothing about it. So they stopped trying.
As a group, the pros didn’t get any better behaved, but the stories of their individual malfeasance no longer makes for big news. As a result, it no longer requires anything more than the limpest sort of reaction.
This week, just to take a random example, Miami Dolphins superstar Tyreek Hill’s ex-wife accused him of repeatedly beating her up.
The NFL’s response, reduced – ‘We heard. We’re checking it out. We’ll get back to you.’
The Dolphins’ response – ‘They said they’d check it out.’
Hill is clear to play on Sunday.
If 2,000 Dolphins ticket holders refuse to enter the stadium, instead spending the game picketing in the parking lot, guess what? Hill will not be playing the Sunday after that. But that won’t happen. So this story is already over.
It’s not that no one cared. It’s that too few paying customers cared enough to change their consumer behaviour.
In the case of our five hockey players, the NHL has taken the biblical route. First, wash your hands. Then, like Pontius Pilate, let the mob decide.
My guess? That no one who buys hockey tickets in bulk will care if their team hires one of these guys. Not enough to do anything about it. Not based on recent fan behaviour in other sports – and those ones don’t have a culture crisis.
For some fans, that will be a principled conclusion. They were accused, they were cleared by a judge, and that’s that.
For others, it will be a self-interested decision. Why should I be robbed of the enjoyment I get in watching this team because it chose to hire someone I find distasteful?
Others still – the least effective of all – will vent online, and think their job is done. Then it’s back to the playoff push.
There is still the possibility of a fan who has spent years hanging in there and is about to finally dip a foot in their moral Rubicon. Hiring one of these guys will be a step too far. They’ll stop buying tickets, cancel their Sportsnet subscription and bury their jersey in a drawer.
If that person exists in numbers, then the NHL should worry.
But if they don’t – if they never really did as anything more than an internet construct – then the NHL and every other league don’t need to worry any more.
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