I was looking forward to watching the Vancouver Canucks play the Vegas Golden Knights on Thursday night.
My beloved Canucks had knocked off the Golden Knights 5-2 in Game 2 of their Stanley Cup quarter-final series last Tuesday. They looked good, too, except for a 15-minute spell in the second period when it looked like they were an American Hockey League team.
But thanks to extenuating circumstances elsewhere in the world, I wasn’t disappointed that Thursday’s game wasn’t played until Saturday.
Pro sports leagues went on pause in the middle of last week in response to the shooting of Jacob Blake at the hands of police in Wisconsin – the latest incident of a black man in the U.S. being shot by a white police officer.
A multi-day pause in sports shouldn’t have been a surprise. A lot of NBA players were hesitant to play this bubble postseason after the death of George Floyd earlier this year in Minneapolis. They thought it might be better to stay out of the playoffs. So you knew that if there was another incident in which a black man was harmed by police, NBA players would be questioning whether to keep playing
They did, but only after a three-day pause, and some concessions by the league’s owners.
Other leagues took a break on Wednesday, but the NHL kept playing, leading to criticism in many circles. Then they postponed the games that were scheduled for Thursday and Friday.
Under normal circumstances, it would have been tough for the NHL to suspend its games on Wednesday, especially after one game had already been completed. But with the bubble, and the lack of travel in this postseason, delaying Wednesday’s games would have been a lot easier.
There is a strong message in the NHL joining other leagues in halting play for two days. Players in the league are predominantly white. There isn’t a lot of blacks and other minorities in the league. When the players in the largely white league say they’re going to take a break to send a message about racial issues, it carries a lot of weight.
(It sounds like the Canucks took a pretty active role in calling for a break).
I don’t think the NHL is a racist league, and I don’t view hockey as a racist sport. Are there racists in the game? Almost certainly. But it’s probably a small fraction of players, coaches and others in the sport.
Thankfully, there is growing disdain towards those who carry racist attitudes.
At the same time, we have to recognize that blacks and other minorities haven’t always been encouraged to take up the game. That’s an attitude that has to change.
Hopefully, these protests that we saw last week will be a catalyst towards getting more minorities involved in hockey.
As a Canucks fan, I was pretty proud when I watched the players on my team stand behind Ryan Reaves, the agitating, grinding (and highly effective) forward for the Golden Knights. The comments by Canucks captain Bo Horvath showed that his leadership wasn’t just limited to on the ice or in the locker room.
And as loathsome as he can be on the ice, Reaves might have as much credibility in this issue as anyone. His dad, Willard, is a retired American football player who rates among the best I’ve seen in the CFL during his time with the Winnipeg Blue Bombers in the 1980s. When Willard retired from football, he became a police officer in Winnipeg.
There’s a lot of experience that Ryan Reaves can draw from when he speaks on this issue.
And if you want to hear a perfect summary of why these protests happened and why they’re justifiable, listen Brian Burke’s comments on Saturday night’s broadcast of Hockey Night in Canada. As Canadians, it’s not always easy for us to fully grasp what’s happening in the U.S.
As I’ve said before, I hope the last few months represent a flashpoint, a turning point, for our society. I hope that all of this represents a catalyst towards serious change on everything from equal rights to how we view and treat minorities.
I think the calls to defund the police are absurd, but there are a lot of issues that they bring up that need to be addressed.
I don’t want to be in a situation in which in a few years, we look back and say “remember all the talk about serious change in 2020? What happened?”
We’ve seen a lot of things happen in the last few months. Lots of good, some not so good. But most of them are small things. The bigger changes are going to take a lot longer to materialize.
