NHL distancing itself from Hockey Diversity Alliance
No one from the National Hockey League will come right out and say why they have distanced themselves from the Hockey Diversity Alliance led by Evander Kane and Akim Aliu. But it isn’t all that difficult to figure out.
The NHL says it wants to do the right thing when it comes to Black Lives Matter and dealing with the longterm history of racism in its sport, when it comes to taking important stands and fighting intolerance and to making certain there are greater opportunities for minorities in the game.
The league is steadfast about that. It just doesn’t want to do it the way in which Kane, Aliu and the HDA were pushing and proposing it. And that personality clash of leadership has placed the Hockey Diversity Alliance on one side and the NHL on another side of a very significant battle.
This isn’t just a division between the league and the Alliance group, which came to fruition after numerous wellknown instances were made public about racial problems in hockey.
In this case, this is an internal division between Black players, some on one side, some on the other, almost all of them inside the NHL world.
Most of them are not necessarily working against each other, but in this case, they’re not necessarily working together, either.
On one side, there is the HDA with Kane, Aliu, Matthew Dumba of the Minnesota Wild as the most prominent voices of the movement against what they call “systemic racism and intolerance in hockey.”
On other side there is Kim Davis, the NHL’s executive vice-president, Social Impact, Growth Initiatives and Legislative Affairs, with league backing, and prominent hockey voices, players such as P.K. Subban, and former players turned broadcasters Anson Carter and Kevin Weekes.
And caught somewhere in the middle are Trevor Daley, now in the front office of the Pittsburgh Penguins, and Chris Stewart, now working for the Philadelphia Flyers, two recently retired NHL players, whose names are listed as founders of the HDA.
This is an uncomfortable subject, this division, even for those directly involved on either side of the apparent dispute. The HDA was necessarily born after a series of racially related incidents, recent and not-so-recent, came to light. The initial idea was supposed to be aligned with the NHL. The goal was to not just “change the face of hockey,” but to create more opportunities for minority players, coaches and management in the game while, at the same time, battle “social justice in support of black, indigenous and racialized communities.”
The Alliance asked a lot of the NHL with its initial pledge — with some of the initial proposals ambitious but somewhat impossible — and it also asked for a significant financial contribution. It isn’t known how large that contribution was intended to be.