The NHL is our last hope for sanity in an insane sports world

The NHL is the least woke of the four major North American pro sports leagues and has become an outlet for strong libertarians like myself. 

While the NHL may engage in corporate DEI language, symbolic gestures, and league-wide initiatives, it remains a safe haven for sanity. Why? It doesn’t often center those gestures as its identity. Contrast that to the NBA or the NFL, where left-wing political alignment’s part of their brand.

In the NBA and the NFL, you’ll often see inflated egos and single players own the playground, like LeBron James and Patrick Mahomes, respectively. The NHL has players like Sidney Crosby and Alex Ovechkin, two names even those who don’t follow the league recognize. But the NHL’s team-first, no-ego approach has kept it from turning into Sid’s and Ovi’s playground.

As I write this, the Colorado Avalanche are playing like a group of 23 possessed men. Nathan MacKinnon, Martin Necas, and Cale Makar look like a Hall-of-Fame worthy Big Three. But outside of the NHL landscape, how many people know who the hell MacKinnon, Necas, and Makar are?

I could ask my extended family about them and I’ll get blank stares. Hell, even my aging grandparents know about LeBron James and Patrick Mahomes. As for MacKinnon, Necas, and Makar? Yeah, I could tell them who they are and they’d forget about two minutes later.

In a sports world where political activism aligns with egos, the NHL does a damn good job, for the most part, remembering why it exists: to entertain sports fans.

What’s keeping the NHL from going all out woke?

Hockey fans are more regionally rooted, more likely to value tradition and merit, and they lean more middle and upper-middle class. You can also say they’re more suburban and exurban. These traits root them further into conservatism. For right-leaning libertarians like myself, we have way more in common with these people.

Should the NHL’s demographics stand pat, expect the league to keep tabs on the symbolic gestures and DEI pandering. That said, it also doesn’t mean the NHL is right-wing; it’s just less receptive to ideological messaging packaged as moral obligation.

A fair share of the NHL is Eastern European, Scandinavian/Nordic, Russian, and Canadian prairie. These cultures don’t share in American (and Canadian) progressive assumptions, treat politics as private and not performative, and aren’t big fans of America’s ongoing culture war.

Is it any wonder I inject NHL references into so many books?

My post-apocalyptic dystopian science military fantasy trilogy, Sentrys of Terrene, is all about references to the Buffalo Sabres. From naming my protagonist Sabre, to names like Tage and Ras, and even an older character named J.R. (a tribute to the late, great Rick Jeanneret, often known as RJ).

I named a fighting force the Goatheads, and even called antagonists Venn Eich (a reference to Jack Eichel) and Venn Rhine (a reference to Sam Reinhart). That said, it’s hard to hate on them for wanting to leave Buffalo, given the fiasco the Sabres have been in since my favorite Spotify singer, Gyubin, was four.

But I didn’t stop there. Look at my YA academy series, Arcane Elemental Academy. Yote Diamondback is named after the old Arizona Coyotes and her sister, Jett, is named after the Winnipeg Jets. Yote also wears a shade of forest green often, a testament to one of the Coyotes’ primary colors.

Wanna meet Yote? Is libertarian fiction your thing? Then check out the first three chapters of Book I in the series, The Arcane Prophecy. You ain’t getting corporate-friendly, DEI and ESG-driven fiction by me.