A highly chequered 2021 for the National Hockey League came to an end with the postponement of more games due to COVID, allegations of sexual abuse cover-up, and bullish economic news for the league’s owners and executives.
Most recently, dozens of December and January games have been postponed because of the Omicron wave of COVID ripping through North America, including arena stands and dressing rooms. Socialist Alternative previously wrote about NHL owners’ callous disregard for players’ safety, and this remains in full evidence — indeed, games are currently being rescheduled only because of new state-mandated attendance restrictions and border policies, not because of any concern for the health of players and fans. However, in October, a different kind of proof of their disregard also came to light.
Players suffering from systemic abuse
The sexual assault revelations of former Chicago Blackhawks’ prospect Kyle Beach have again thrown the more sinister side of Canada’s national sport into public view. The attempt by the club and the league to sweep this under the rug was successful for a decade after the alleged incident occurred during the Blackhawks’ Stanley Cup run of 2010, and this hushing-up is far from the first one in the recent history of North American hockey. It was preceded especially by the emotional cases of Sheldon Kennedy and Theoren Fleury, players who suffered prolonged sexual abuse by coaches during their time in junior hockey. All three of these players, as well as doubtless many other victims, who have kept silent to this day, feared social ostracization and derailment of their careers if they publicly came forward, feeling no choice but to suffer their emotional damage in isolation.
The disturbing story of Beach broke when he identified himself as the “John Doe,” who filed a lawsuit against the team in May 2021 for its mishandling of his sexual assault allegations. The Blackhawks ordered an independent investigation in June 2021 into the allegations against former Blackhawks’ video coach Brad Aldrich, who Beach alleges forced him into a sexual encounter in part by threatening him with a souvenir baseball bat. The investigation revealed that a meeting of a group of Blackhawks’ leaders took place two weeks after the alleged assault on May 8 or 9, 2010 to discuss what happened. No action was taken then against Aldrich and the team allowed him to have a day with the Cup. Only after the team’s Stanley Cup victory did the team’s Director of Human Resources meet with Aldrich (on June 16), where Aldrich was given an option to undergo an investigation or resign. He chose to resign. Evidently the Blackhawks did not see any benefit in rocking the boat in order to protect a fringe player who could easily be replaced. Beach would never play an NHL game.
The release of the investigation’s report in late October led to the resignations of Blackhawks’ general manager and president Stan Bowman and Florida Panthers head coach Joel Quenneville, who was the bench boss in Chicago in 2010. Kevin Chevaldayoff, who was assistant general manager of the Blackhawks and is currently GM for the Winnipeg Jets, ignored pressure that he also leaves his current position.
This is not the first occurrence in recent memory of an NHL attempt to downplay or disregard a player’s mistreatment. Akim Aliu, a former player in the Blackhawks and Calgary Flames organizations, came forward in 2019 with his long experience on the receiving end of racism as a Black hockey player, from coaches, fans, and fellow players. There are two instances of particular note in his story, the first being the racist bullying that a then-16-year-old Aliu suffered at the hands of eventual nine-year NHLer Steve Downie when they were teammates at the Ontario Hockey League’s Windsor Spitfires in the 2005-06 season. After Aliu — who had already been targeted by the Spitfires’ established star Downie for harassment — refused to participate in a hazing ritual that involved being stripped naked and crammed with other rookies into the bathroom of the team bus, at a subsequent practice Downie cross-checked Aliu full in the mouth, knocking out seven of his teeth. Later in his career, at the Blackhawks’ minor-league affiliate Rockford IceHogs, then-coach Bill Peters repeatedly yelled that racial slur at Aliu, apparently because the coach didn’t approve of his player’s choice of dressing-room music.
What did those in positions of power do to reply to these instances of abuse? In the case of Beach, his attacker was quietly shuffled out of the organization after that season, and only after the story went public 11 years later did NHL commissioner Gary Bettman slap the club’s wrist with a US$2 million fine. Beach’s lawsuit against the Blackhawks was settled confidentially on December 15th. For Aliu, both he and Downie were traded from the Spitfires, while the team’s coach was suspended for 40 games and the club fined $35,000. At the time of Aliu’s revelations about him, Peters was coaching the Flames, the team for whom Aliu played his seven total NHL games in 2012 and 2013. Peters resigned from that position. The NHL itself committed only to “antiracism training” in the typical corporate sense of, to borrow a phrase from another sport, covering all their bases. This response was opposed by some players, particularly the POC players who launched the Hockey Diversity Alliance in 2020. After the NHL’s equivocating response to the Aliu revelations, the HDA said that the league “is not prepared to make any measurable commitments to end systemic racism in hockey,” and that Bettman and company “focused on performative public relations efforts that seemed aimed at quickly moving past important conversations about race needed in the game.”
In both of these cases, and future ones if they can get away with it, the NHL will do the bare minimum and try to ensure the headlines are as short-lived as possible. This was exemplified by the league’s equivocation during the height of the Black Lives Matter movement in the summer of 2020, when the league only reluctantly gave in to players’ refusal to come out for playoff games on August 27 after league-sanctioned pre-game “moments of reflection” were castigated by players and those outside the hockey world. The strike (wrongly called a “boycott” by some) came in the wake of the police shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin, and was especially influenced by female and male professional basketball players’ similar strike the day before. Unfortunately, the games were being played again by the end of the week.
The league’s foot-dragging over concussion issues and liability could be cited as well. The tamping-down to the greatest degree possible of all these is important in terms of public image and enticing TV deals and sponsors, who will be reluctant to deal with the league (or at least drive a harder bargain) if their own brands might be tarnished by association with sexual or racial abuse.
Hockey: a capitalist enterprise
Bettman has been the NHL’s commissioner since 1993, and by the metrics of the team owners to whom he is responsible, he has been hugely successful. The NHL’s revenues in that time have increased from US$1.4 billion (adjusted for inflation) to an estimate of more than $5 billion for the current season, through TV deals, expansion and relocation of teams to larger markets, and victories over the players’ union in labour disputes in 1995, 2005, and 2013. Fans have of course also had to pick up the tab, through higher prices for tickets, concessions, merchandise, parking, and so on.
Bettman’s job is essentially that of a typical chief executive: increasing revenues, decreasing costs, and maintaining smooth operations and a squeaky-clean image for the business. From his and other executives’ point of view, cases such as those of Beach and Aliu are not imperatives for needed change and protection of players, but distractions and annoyances, which are to be dealt with as quietly and inexpensively as possible.
And like in a typical workplace, the management also sees the potential power of workers — in this case, primarily players — as a distraction and annoyance, as well as a threat. An important, decades-old, and successful tactic in the owners’ playbook has been the promotion of the concept that owning a hockey team is a money-losing venture, that they are essentially idle rich who enter into sports ownership out of a love for the game (or perhaps for the baser motivation of personal prestige) and are willing to tolerate financial losses as long as they don’t get really excessive. Cases such as the perpetually troubled Arizona Coyotes are often advanced as evidence. But the Coyotes are an exception with low ticket sales very dissimilar to, say, the New York Rangers, who were recently valued by Forbes as hockey’s first US$2 billion club. Much sports media also tries to paint labour disputes between owners and players as a fight of “billionaires versus millionaires,” as two sides equally remote from most fans.
Bettman and the NHL owners are already well into preparation for another war against the players in an effort to further boost revenues onto the owners’ side and will cry poverty or an “unsustainable business model” in their attempt. This is in spite of the announcement late last year of the cracking of the US$5 billion revenue ceiling for the first time, buoyed in part by two new US television deals. This will be added to next season by the first ever advertising on players’ jerseys (a follow-up to last season’s introduction of advertising on helmets). Roch Carrier’s beloved children’s book, The Hockey Sweater could confuse future young hockey fans, who might wonder if he simply forgot to include a Molson logo.
Who owns our game?
Laying out the scoundrels’ row of the 32 NHL owners is far beyond the scope of this article. One could write volumes about just the villainous owners of the league’s past, such as Harold Ballard, the owner of the Toronto Maple Leafs, from 1972 until his death in 1990. Early in his tenure, Ballard was convicted of defrauding the club but was still permitted by the league to remain in command, becoming reviled by fans not just for his financial malfeasance but also for allowing years of mediocre on-ice performances with the understanding that ticket-buying Torontonians would fill Maple Leaf Gardens no matter how bad the team was. Ballard finds plenty of worthy successors in the NHL owners of today.
Today’s NHL owners include executives and heirs of Molson Coors, Rogers, Bell, Comcast, Walmart, SAP, Fidelity, Little Caesars, and other huge businesses in fields ranging from real estate to fossil fuels. To take one example, Ottawa Senators’ owner Eugene Melnyk is the former head of pharmaceutical company Biovail, where the highlight of his reign was settling for US$10 million with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for accounting fraud. He is more infamous for his bellicose demands that Canada’s federal government give him a new arena on land it owns in the city’s downtown, with the implicit threat that he will move “his” team to somewhere more lucrative if he doesn’t get what he wants. Melnyk, who now lives in Barbados, is worth an estimated $1.21 billion and would love nothing more than for that number to go up through state largesse.
The role of players’ organization
What is the players’ union, the National Hockey League Players’ Association, to do here? In the case of the racial or sexual abuse of players, obviously the union can accept zero of either. But that is easy enough to say — the league claims the same thing. The union, led by the most militant players, must fight to establish and then use its own mechanisms for investigation, and for punishment if players are perpetrating the abuses. If the abuses are coming from management, players must have the power and confidence to collectively fight back, and not leave it only to the victimized players to do so. This power must include the ability to force the dismissal and, in serious cases, prosecution of abusive coaches and executives. The union must take a leading role in ensuring players’ safety and dignity in major-junior and minor-professional league hockey as well — these are players as young as 16, most of whom have moved out of their hometowns to play.
NHL players will also need to build for a hard battle in the negotiations over their next collective agreement — the current one, born out of the union’s defeat after the 2012-13 lockout and extended last year to the summer of 2026, has the players owing the owners US$1 billion to be paid back through lower salaries over the coming years. Getting players and fans actively on the same side to attack the owners’ big profits and translating this into not just better conditions for players but also lower ticket and merchandise prices for fans, is the best way toward a better deal.
Socialism and sports
A socialist society may well, indeed probably would, democratically decide to devote resources to maintaining full-time elite athletes to perform and marvel at. Sports teams are deeply woven into the fabric of large cities and small towns, but the relationship today is often fraught with tensions, most often around prestigious sporting institutions holding a too-hallowed position at the expense of more pressing social needs, showered with big municipal tax breaks or sports-orientated infrastructure investments while social housing, public transit, and countless other public goods go underfunded. There is also the problem of the wedge the owners drive, as needed, between players and fans. But a socialist order in which profit and team owners are as obsolete as leather pads, and everyone’s basic needs are assured, could have sports occupying a much healthier place in society’s fabric. Fabulous new arenas and stadiums would not come at the expense of everyone having a good home and job, and those facilities would be filled both by fans paying far lower ticket prices and by players who will have the power and unified desire to play the game in an environment of their choosing, with today’s abusive behaviours being forever locked up alongside capitalist profit in the hockey hall of shame.
