jeffwOct 14, 2023

The NHL bans Pride Tape, setting off a backlash from players and fans

https://lemmy.world/post/6794319

The NHL bans Pride Tape, setting off a backlash from players and fans - Lemmy.World

Highlights: Rainbow-colored Pride Tape has been part of pro ice hockey for seven years, symbolizing the sport’s pledge to be welcoming and inclusive. But the NHL has banned the athletic tape, quickly sparking a backlash. “I’ll use the tape — if I have to buy it myself, I will,” Philadelphia Flyers forward Scott Laughton said on Wednesday, discussing how he would mark his team’s Pride Night. The NHL announced over the summer that its players will no longer wear special jerseys during warmups to mark “theme nights,” when teams show support for a variety of groups, from the LGBTQ+ community to Indigenous groups, the military, and people fighting cancer. But as the NHL prepared to start a new season, it sent a memo announcing the ban also applies to Pride Tape. The abrupt shift came after several NHL players made headlines last season for refusing to wear Pride Night themed jerseys, citing religious or other reasons. The multicolored Pride Tape quickly became an “ingrained part of hockey culture” — and that quote comes from the NHL’s own website, in a story from 2021. Pride Tape was backed by a Kickstarter campaign in 2015, as a simple way to encourage LGBTQ+ youth to get involved in team sports.

Show threadSeaJOct 14, 2023
It’s one thing to not do pride jerseys anymore. It’s a whole other level of fucked up that they are banning fucking tape. This is basically saying they do not want any openly LGBTQ players or allies of them.
Show threadMudfaceOct 14, 2023

That’s not at all what they’re saying. This is the fault of the Twitter crowd who harassed the league about players who didn’t want to wear the jersey’s in warm ups.

Twitter made such a massive deal about 2-3 players not wearing the jersey and turned what was supposed to be a great thing for the lgbtq community, with hundreds of players wearing them proudly into a shit storm of negativity.

Unfortunately, this put the league in a really impossible spot. Either they allow the terrier mob to blow the situation way out of proportion with negativity surrounding these inclusivity celebrations or they would have to mandate players wear them and punish them for not wearing them.

That would likely lead to problems with the union, possible issues with the next CBA and possibly lost season(s).

What we should learn from this, I think, is to just ignore people who have dumb beliefs and celebrate the ones who have it right.

Instead of making fringe players like provorov or Reimer the entirety of the publicity and the story and amplifying them, we should be talking about the actual GOATs proudly wearing them and turning it into a positive thing for the league.

McDavid, Crosby, Ovechkin, Matthews, Mackinnon, etc

Amplify the fact that the best of the best players in the world want everyone to feel included.

I feel bad for the league, they obviously wanted to do these things, they did them for years, until it turned into really really bad press for the league.

Show threadDepress_Mode
A few players cause massive public relations nightmare for being bigots, and your conclusion is to get mad at the public and not the bigots? That’s a terrible conclusion.
Oct 14, 2023 at 6:11pmWeb
Show threadMudfaceOct 14, 2023

There’s about 800 players in the NHL. Twitter focussed on 2-3 of them and ruined it for everyone.

Yes, this is the fault of people who can’t see the good in something, they need to make the negative the most talked about thing.

If those people wanted to celebrate inclusivity, they should have done that.

Show threadDepress_ModeOct 14, 2023

More like the NHL tried to do an inclusive event, but 2 or 3 players were able to spit on the whole thing, and the NHL allowed them to very visibly undermine it, justifiably calling the whole thing into question. If the NHL allows that, then I’m sure they aren’t as progressive as they’d like to appear.

If it was truly only 2 or 3 players, I doubt there’d be much pushback from the union for taking action after making them all look bad. This kind of thing only works if literally everyone participates. If those players refused, they shouldn’t have been let on the ice at the very least. Being willing to do that would say way more for the NHL’s support for the LGBT community than wearing rainbow jerseys.

The NHL has shown this was just a PR stunt and doesn’t actually have the backs of its fans. Now, those 2-3 players have somehow forced a multi-billion dollar corporation to completely roll over and drop any pretense of support for the LGBT community in its entirety. I’m surprised they didn’t just fire them for causing such a headache and to help save face.

Show threadMudfaceOct 14, 2023

Of course it’s just a PR stunt. Do you not realize that’s the entire reason companies and organizations do these types of promotional things?

They want to sell jerseys and get people to tune in or come to the arena.

For example, when was the last time you saw BLM messaging at an NFL game?

chicagotribune.com/…/ZDQATCHVZJHIVN25KNGO2XVXZQ.j…

If this was anything more than PR for these people, it wouldn’t have ever gone away.