{"id":136125,"date":"2025-09-11T21:21:07","date_gmt":"2025-09-11T21:21:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/136125\/"},"modified":"2025-09-11T21:21:07","modified_gmt":"2025-09-11T21:21:07","slug":"players-acquitted-in-hockey-canada-sex-assault-trial-can-return-to-nhl-on-dec-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/136125\/","title":{"rendered":"Players acquitted in Hockey Canada sex assault trial can return to NHL on Dec. 1"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The five players acquitted in the Hockey Canada sexual assault trial can return to the NHL when their suspensions end on Dec. 1, the NHL announced Thursday.<\/p>\n<p>The players, who are all unrestricted free agents, can sign with a team on Oct. 15 as they wait for full reinstatement.<\/p>\n<p>Michael McLeod, Dillon Dube, Cal Foote, Alex Formenton and Carter Hart were all charged with one count of sexual assault and pleaded not guilty when the trial opened in April.<\/p>\n<p>MacLeod had also been charged with one count of being a party to the offences.<\/p>\n<p>The five players were acquitted of all charges on July 24 after a two-month trial in London, Ont.<\/p>\n<p>Following the ruling, the NHL had said the players would be ineligible to compete and that the league would review the judge&#8217;s findings.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The five players acquitted in the Hockey Canada sexual assault trial can return to the NHL when their&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":136126,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[556],"tags":[64,63,575,85],"class_list":["post-136125","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nhl","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-nhl","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/136125","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=136125"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/136125\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/136126"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=136125"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=136125"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=136125"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}