{"id":51774,"date":"2025-08-07T10:11:08","date_gmt":"2025-08-07T10:11:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/51774\/"},"modified":"2025-08-07T10:11:08","modified_gmt":"2025-08-07T10:11:08","slug":"the-nhl-preached-inclusion-so-why-has-it-got-into-bed-with-donald-trump-nhl","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/51774\/","title":{"rendered":"The NHL preached inclusion. So why has it got into bed with Donald Trump? | NHL"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cDiverse representation within inclusive environments is proven to advance innovation, creativity, and decision-making \u2013 all of which are critically important to the growth of the sport and our business,\u201d NHL commissioner Gary Bettman wrote in his introduction to the NHL\u2019s first \u2013 and only, so far \u2013 diversity and inclusion report<\/a>, which it released in 2022. \u201cRecognizing these facts, we are working to better understand and accelerate our engagement across all layers of diversity \u2013 including nationality, race, gender identity, sexual orientation, disability, and religion \u2013 and their nuances and intersections,\u201d Bettman continued.<\/p>\n

Last week, Bettman was named<\/a> alongside NHL legend Wayne Gretzky, Florida Panthers\u2019 captain Matthew Tkachukx6x and various representatives of other sports as a member of Donald Trump\u2019s sports council. The council will be responsible for \u2013 among other things \u2013 playing an \u201cimportant role in restoring tradition to college athletics, including \u2026 keeping men out of women\u2019s sports.\u201d Not what you\u2019d call an opportunity for Bettman et al to gain a better understanding of the nuances of gender identity, by the sounds of it.<\/p>\n

This is not the first time Bettman has given mixed messages around social issues. In 2023, for example, NHL tried to host a career fair<\/a> aimed at recruiting a more diverse workforce (its inclusivity report noted that the league\u2019s employees were roughly 84% white and 93% straight). The event, attached to that year\u2019s All Star Game in Florida, quickly caught the attention of the governor\u2019s office, which accused the NHL of discrimination \u2013 against white people. The league cancelled the career fair.<\/p>\n

A few weeks later, the NHL again had the opportunity to stand for its diversity values when a handful of players refused to wear their team\u2019s Pride-themed warmup jerseys. Instead, the NHL retreated meekly, encouraging \u201cvoices and perspectives on social and cultural issues.\u201d That June \u2013 Pride month, no less \u2013 Bettman cancelled the Pride jerseys altogether, calling<\/a> the furor around them \u201ca distraction\u201d from the intended message.<\/p>\n

One wonders what he will call his own foray directly into the culture wars or, for that matter, how the NHL may characterize this particular moment of self-expression from the commissioner. It\u2019s likely that Bettman\u2019s participation in Trump\u2019s sports council will fall into the \u201cvoices and perspectives on social and cultural issues\u201d category the league talked about during the Pride jerseys fiasco. But seeing as the Trump seems fixated on getting trans women out of college sports \u2013 even though there are fewer than 10<\/a> transgender athletes in college sports, according to the president of the NCAA \u2013 this feels like a very specific kind of perspective on a cultural issue, doesn\u2019t it?<\/p>\n

What\u2019s so aggravating about repeated allowances for anti-LGBTQ+ perspectives from the NHL<\/a> under the guise of simply letting all opinions flourish equally, is how it pretends that these views are all morally equivalent when they\u2019re not. Sure, the players who refused to wear a Pride-themed jersey can\u2019t be forced to wear them, but it\u2019s not like it was simply a fashion choice. Fundamentally, those players made that decision based on a worldview that refuses to accept LGBTQ+ people, including their fellow hockey players, as being equal to them and everyone else. It\u2019s not the jerseys that were the problem \u2013 but they did a great job highlighting it.<\/p>\n

Earlier this spring, Harrison Browne, the first transgender player in professional hockey, wrote that while in the NCAA, he was offered the option to have his own locker room and change his pronouns on the roster. \u201cLooking back, I realize how important it is for trans and non-binary student athletes to have those options, whether or not they take them,\u201d Browne wrote<\/a> in The Walrus. \u201cThese choices provide a baseline of institutional acceptance and acknowledgment for gender-diverse athletes at all levels.\u201d On Monday, Browne told the Guardian via email that \u201cto see [Bettman, Gretzky, and Tkachuk] get behind an administration that is targeting marginalized communities, especially trans people in sports, is deeply disturbing and a huge step backwards in making hockey a more inclusive sport.\u201d<\/p>\n

And going backwards really isn\u2019t Bettman\u2019s thing, or it never used to be. When he accepted his job as commissioner in 1992, he told a room full of reporters<\/a> that \u201cthe way a league performs well is by making its product as attractive as it can to the greatest number of fans.\u201d He believed in growth, in other words \u2013 even up until 2022. What he risks now is stagnation, regression even. On that same day in 1992, Bettman said<\/a> that he wanted to make hockey, a sport that at the time was seen as violent and retrograde, more \u201cuser-friendly.\u201d And he acknowledged that to do it, he\u2019d need to push some of the older owners into the future. \u201cIt may be that we are going to head in new, progressive directions that will make sense to every one immediately,\u201d Bettman said. \u201cFor some, it may take a little more time.\u201d<\/p>\n

Maybe the diversity and inclusion stuff doesn\u2019t totally make sense to Bettman in 2025 \u2013 other North American sports have decided that they don\u2019t have the stomach to fight the culture wars under Trump either<\/a>, and NFL commission Roger Goodell is also on the White House sports council. But Bettman should give the league\u2019s diversity policies time to grow, rather than deliberately reversing course, hurting hockey\u2019s players and fans, and ultimately jeopardising the future success of the sport for everyone. If that\u2019s too much to ask, at the very least, if he\u2019s invited to join a club created by a hostile and retrograde president, he should by now have the smarts to just say no.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cDiverse representation within inclusive environments is proven to advance innovation, creativity, and decision-making \u2013 all of which are…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":51775,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[433],"tags":[49,48,448,82],"class_list":["post-51774","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nhl","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-nhl","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51774","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=51774"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51774\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/51775"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=51774"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=51774"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=51774"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}