Hockey players are stupid assholes

The National Hockey League is the fourth place professional sports league in the United States, trailing far behind the National Football League, the National Basketball Association and Major League Baseball. Sure, they’ve experienced good success / growth with recent expansion franchises in Las Vegas and Seattle and the movement of the hapless Arizona Coyotes to Utah to become the Mammoth. But I get blank spaces during the ESPN+ game broadcasts and see the same ads over and over. And there are numerous other indicators of how the great game of hockey just doesn’t draw as many fans as some think it should.

Including, for example, average salaries. It was big news this summer when the Minnesota Wild awarded Kiril Kaprizov a $17M annual salary. There were a bunch of other super star players, many with greater accomplishments than Kaprizov, due salary extensions / negotiations and there was some fear he’d reset the bar. Turns out, a host of really big names are still on $11-13M contracts. As I was reciting over on the tweeters, $17M is 10th highest-paid NFL guard money. It is 20th place MLB outfielder and top-5 relief pitcher money. It is so far down the NBA player list it is for guys you’ve never heard of like Norman Powell and Patrick Williams. For goodness sake, Tadej Pogačar, (albeit the generational best and perhaps best ever), a professional in the very obscure sport of road cycling even makes €8M ($9.3M) per year as team salary.

You would think that hockey would be doing every possible thing it can to draw in new fans at all times.

You would be wrong.

Because hockey players are stupid assholes. And so are the coaches and general managers.

The stupid idiot knucklehead Tkachuk brothers have posted a podcast from which a clip is making the rounds. In this, Matti (a run-away agitator who makes $9.5M) and Brady (a thug player who makes $8.2M) wax on about how much it offends them when women have the temerity to use their hockey nickname. Matti said: “nothing worse than when girls call a player by their nickname“. This is Cam Newton “It’s funny to hear a female talk about routes.” level stupid misogyny. It is not just dumb, it’s actively working against drawing in fans from one of the largest untapped pools, i.e., women.

And speaking of alienating women, this brings me to the other stupid idiot move of the month, this one involving the Las Vegas Golden Knights. For those who don’t know the VGK have been a whopping commercial success for the NHL, drawing in new local fans and re-enthusing out of town fans such as YHN. They managed to avoid the curse of expansion franchises by making it all the way to the Stanley Cup final their first year and winning the Cup in 2023. They led the way to Vegas for the NFL (the Raiders moved) and the MLB (Oakland A’s are in the process of moving) and I’m sure a NBA franchise will eventually come to Vegas.

The VGK recently hired a goalie who had been out of the NHL for two years, due to a suspension. This suspension was because of a sexual assault prosecution involving the actions of this player and four other hockey meatheads who played for Hockey Canada in 2018. They were acquitted in July of 2025 and the NHL allowed them to return, if any team wanted them. You can look up the reporting for yourself. Suffice it to say that it’s a pretty usual they-said (there were five of them) / she-said (yeah, just one woman in the hotel room) situation.

The relatively undisputed facts seem to be the woman went to one player’s room, they had sex and then he texted his bros to come to the room. Gross. I’m out right there. YMMV.

Look, nobody has a “right” to play for the NHL. There are all kinds of players who don’t get a break at the right time, based on chance or dis/favoritism or character or fit. Players get traded or sent to the minors for all sorts of reasons that may not be completely objectively about hockey merit. Hiring an accused rapist is a massive black eye for a sports franchise and it is just plain stupid for a franchise that needs to grow the audience. The VGK don’t need this clown. They are a premier franchise. They can pick and choose. Sure, they are a little panicky with their goalie situation right now, but there is no real indication this is a head and shoulder’s above type of player. Especially considering he’s been out of the league for two years.

This is a massive own-goal.

It is likely not news to you that sports bro teams are a danger to women when it comes to sexual assaults. I don’t know what the hell is wrong with people but football players, hockey players, basketball players…the scandals start in high school. Sexual assaults of various stripes, encouraged by the flocking of women to the local fame of a sports hero. Accelerated into the college years by the thrill of minor fame and maybe even the prospects of hooking an athlete who is going places. But caused, make no mistake about it, by young men who view women as playthings for their enjoyment and cruelty.

I happened to attend a very small college which had a Division I hockey program and this stuff played out in plain view, since we were such a small campus. I can’t say with any authority how many sexual assaults happened, this is in part because people were not really as woke to consent, assault and related issues so long ago. But those guys were dicks who clearly had less than the campus average level of respect for women.

Note that this is not endemic to every possible sports team of men. My cycling team sure as shit didn’t have ongoing misogyny. I mean, we weren’t being constantly chatted up by the ladies, so you might question opportunity. But I’m pretty sure we averaged to the woke side when it came to this sort of thing.

No, only some sports teams tend to have chronic problems with misogynistic culture that all too frequently veer into the criminal.

Hockey, the NHL in particular, has made great strides on a lot of issues during my lifetime. It isn’t perfect, and there are some assholes who fight progress. NHL has made strides to welcoming LGBTA+ fans…but of course there have been some bigoted assholes like the Staal brothers complaining about Pride themed stick tape. And a history of homophobic behavior that doesn’t make news. The dummies who run the league then actually banned Pride themed tape until some decent individual defied them. Willie O’Ree, the first Black man to play in the NHL, is a fixture of the league and it is now seemingly rare for a NHL team not to have any Black players. This is progress. Achieved slowly and probably against a lot of overt and covert opposition. One of the asshole college hockey players at my college actually wrote an essay for some class about how Black people were physiologically unsuited to ice skate. (No, he never made it anywhere as a professional player.)

But welcoming back the Hockey Canada players is a step back for the NHL. It alienates women fans, and it alienates a lot of men too. It perpetuates the tolerance of this behavior down into the younger ranks. “She was askin’ for it, so it’s okay” is the message that the NHL is sending on this one.