I’m done with the NHL.
Like any good Canadian, I am a lover of hockey. I grew up playing the sport and probably was a better skater at age 3 than I was a walker. As such, Saturday night was hockey night in Canada and we all tuned in to watch the game. Every winter we would play on the outdoor rinks for hours on end and forget about the time. My fondest memories as a kid were hockey tournaments out of town, and just playing street hockey with the kids outside my house. I was famous on my street for my wicked slapshot, and whenever I was stressed would go outside and just practice shooting on an empty net, seeing how many top corners I could pick consecutively, and see how hard I could slap the orange ball.
Growing up in the Montreal area, I was raised on “The Hockey Sweater” (Le chandail de hockey), a famous children’s book by Roch Carrier, where a boy loves the Habs so much that he is in tears when he receives a jersey of the Toronto Maple Leafs, the Montreal Canadiens’ arch-rival. I quickly became a Habs fan as a result, despite many kids around me becoming Avalanche fans, due to the strength of their team compared to the Habs in the mid-late 90s, as well as due to the fact that they were formerly the Quebec Nordiques, and had the star local boy in nets, Patrick Roy. Watching the games as a young Canadian boy was always a fun experience, even if my team wasn’t always great. I fondly remember in 2002 when Jose Theodore’s underdog Habs took out the big bad Boston Bruins in the playoffs. NHL hockey was fun at that time; the goals were nice, some teams were stacked, there were lots of fights and big hits. The game was in pretty good shape, except for the issues of skyrocketing salaries and so-called clutch and grab hockey. An example of the latter is where a player could essentially bearhug another player in the corner for a few seconds even when the puck was long gone the other way. In terms of salaries, Jaromir Jagr, a famous Czech player was making nearly 8 million USD in 2004, which is only slightly less than the salaries are today, despite revenues being much higher now than then. Something had to give, and in 2004 the league locked out the players for an entire season to restructure.
In 2005, NHL hockey came back and in some ways better than ever, and in others worse. Clutch and grab was down thanks to new rules, and salaries were rolled back despite the complaints of the players and their union. The NHL continued to add teams in the USA non traditional hockey markets. The league now had 30 teams post-lockout, and with a new salary cap introduced, as well as revenue sharing, the teams and play were severely watered down. I want to emphasize the revenue sharing aspect, as rich, popular and successful teams like those in Canada and the Northern USA suddenly were sharing their revenue with sunbelt teams. This has only gotten worse to date, as Canadian teams pay their salaries in USD and have to contend with Canadian taxes, and so the traditionally successful teams have to deal with those factors, as well as having to share with their poorer, less marketable counterparts. Case in point, teams like the Montreal Canadiens and Toronto Maple Leafs are sharing their revenue with teams like the Florida Panthers and the Carolina Hurricanes, who are famous for having specials such as 30$ (USD) for 2 tickets, 2 pizza slices and 2 beers, whereas here in Montreal we pay over 100$ for one ticket in the nosebleeds, 11$ a beer and 7$ a pizza slice. For a couple, you’re looking at minimum about 250$ for the night, and probably to see a loss to the away team from Florida, where their players show up with tans, pay no income taxes and go to the beach after the game.
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| The”death of George Floyd” has proven that “Hockey is Racist“. |
Decomposition of Hockey After 2005
Approaching 2020, the league thanks to its fellow commissioner Gary Bettman has taken yet more steps to destroy itself. Between 2005 and 2020, the league has seen a dramatic drop in quality of play, where it seems each team has about 4 good players, and all the creativity has been pulled from the game, and the strategy now for every team is to dump the puck into the other team’s end, and (thanks to no clutch and grab) attempt to retrieve it, bring it out front and try to shove it in the net by any means necessary. On the business end, teams are now extremely profitable thanks to huge TV contracts (2014-2026 Rogers contract for a record 5.232 Billion dollars), and tickets and merchandise have never been more expensive as mentioned above. This has also coincided with local hockey, which has become so expensive thanks to expensive equipment (made in China no doubt), arena rentals becoming extremely expensive and having to keep up with the kids who send their kids to year-long hockey schools for tens of thousands of dollars. As a result, hockey has become a rich man’s game in Canada.
Another change that has happened to hockey in Canada is a result of the fractioning of the Canadian identity. Progressives in Canada have completely dismantled what it means to be Canadian, and increasingly have latched on to meaningless cultural pursuits like sports, media and pop culture. For example, when a new African immigrant comes to Canada, progressives don’t encourage them to adopt anything meaningful such as Canadian manners, to learn our 2 languages, study our European history (in a positive light), join one of our Christian churches, or join any of our established institutions or cultural activities. No, that would be too much to ask for, and immigrants naturally are averse to such activities anyway. Instead, they latch onto things like hockey in Canada, or football in the USA. And they often become fanatics about them just to illustrate their Canadiana. I have seen time and time again Indian immigrants who do just this, become die-hard hockey fans, despite their thick accents. The government tells us all that they are just as Canadian as we are, because they are walking down the street in a Calgary Flames jersey on a Saturday night.
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| “Move over, Don Cherry, we are the new face of Hockey!” |
Unsurprisingly, hockey enrolment has followed this trend, where rich (doubly privileged) immigrants or mixed-race kids are taking up hockey and even making it to the NHL, and playing a kids game for millions of dollars per year. Tension has inevitably ensued, where the old guard wants to keep the unwritten rules of hockey, compared to the new-guard which wants to sanitize it for globalist sensitivities. The old guard is white, conservative, hard-working, skilled and believes that hard work will pay off and that justice will be carried out man to man. This mentality is perfectly embodied by a guy like Don Cherry, who until recently was the unabashed commentator on Hockey Night in Canada every Saturday night. Even if you didn’t like it or were offended, he would say it like it is.
In my home province in Quebec, he was hated because at that time the vast majority of French Canadian players and Europeans wore visors, and most other North Americans did not, and he said exactly that, to great offence here. He often called out players for not fighting when called upon, and frequently had tributes to hard workers, firemen and police and especially those that serve in the military or lost their life as a result of it. In other words, he is a progressive’s nightmare, and in November 2019 was fired for once again speaking the truth, that “you people” (immigrants) who come her as newcomers should appreciate Canada and its veterans more, which he said as a result of not seeing anyone wearing a poppy in Toronto, which is a majority immigrant city.
Don Cherry won’t be appearing on HNIC ever again, and in his place, the network has heavily promoted the turban-clad Harnarayan Singh, who has apparently saved hockey in Canada. Good thing for good immigrants like him to save hockey and save us from bigots like Don Cherry. Rogers has since diversified their lineup even more, where it’s no longer the domain of white men. They have hired former players whose only qualifications are their sex or skin colour, such as Cassie Campbell and more recently, Anthony Stewart. NBC in the USA had similarly hired former player Anson Carter for the same reason related to melanin.
At the same time, the game has been turned upside down and diversified at the ice level. Seemingly out of nowhere, Akim Aliu, a former player who is half-black and identifies himself as Ukrainian Canadian, came out and wrote an article about hazing and bullying because he was black. He spoke about how a former coach (who was soon after fired from his NHL post) told him to turn off his n**** music, because like a good Ukrainian Canadian was listening to gangster rap in the dressing room. The witch hunt had begun across all levels of hockey and even sports in general. Prominent head coaches like Mike Babcock and Jim Montgomery were soon fired for unnamed things they had said over their careers, among other incidents. Players who are non-white were suddenly given their 15 minutes of fame, and are still riding that fame to this day.
The NHL.com website has hired a black man, William Douglas to write diversity articles. They also have a new blog on the website called “The color of hockey”, which seeks out non-white players for coverage, and vilifies traditional hockey culture while decrying the rampant racism in hockey. The NHL itself has also ramped up its diversity campaigns, giving out money to non-white communities to play hockey and supporting everything from pride parades, to the BLM movement.
Most recently, things have hit a fever pitch. With the high-profile killings of blacks with criminal histories in the USA by police and the subsequent rioting, many sports leagues full of high-school dropouts from the ghetto have spoken on twitter, worn jerseys with names of dead black individuals and conducted massive information campaigns to the public. Strangely, black people are still killing each other, black businesses are being destroyed, and race relations are worse than ever, but they say it is all working and remains necessary work. With the most recent shooting (despite media silence on killing of whites), those same sport leagues have postponed or cancelled their games, and usually playoff games of high importance. The NHL has since followed suit and postponed some of their playoff games. They have also put their mixed race players front and centre, where we now have activist players like Matt Dumba (half Filipino, half white) and Evander Kane (half black, half white) raising their fist during the American anthem, and saying we need to stand with the BLM movement and the NHL needs to do more to fight racism.
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| Matt Dumba raises fist to promote “black power in hockey and fight racist whites”. |
Concluding Thoughts
Here is where it all comes full circle; hockey used to be my favourite past-time, the way for me to take out some stress, to be with other men with testosterone and enjoy a little escapism, which we all need from time to time. It used to be a fun game, and the NHL was the premier league in the world which took the best players from around the world (N-A and Europe) and was unapologetic about being a niche sport. It was something Canadians could rally around and feel was “ours” for better or worse. It has since become a shadow of its former self and the shadow is getting darker. The skill is no longer there, the accessibility for a regular Canadian is no longer there, immigrants and non-whites have taken ownership of the sport, and the league now is just another head of the globalist hydra. And if you want NHL hockey to be as it once was, or support Don Cherry, you are a regressive bigot stuck in the past. If you want politics to stay out of sport, you are Trump supporting-racist-sexist troglodyte. If you think hockey was great before (but not perfect), you are in denial.
These morons are trying to make us feel bad for thinking any of those things, and I have had enough of it. I have had enough of “We skate for Black lives” written on the arenas basically on the viewer’s dime. I have had enough of morons like Matt Dumba tell me I am a racist, meanwhile he is the doubly privileged non-white playing a kids game for millions of dollars. I have had enough of the NHL charging us Canadians hundreds of dollars to see a game with no skill, and all politics. I have had enough of the virtue signalling for people that don’t even like hockey, let alone the NHL. The days of “The Hockey Sweater” are long gone, and I think I will start watching the KHL or more junior hockey, where prices are reasonable, there is no politics or lecturing and the old hockey culture remains. I invite others to do the same.
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