This has been a pretty dark year for many people, but it’s also not been a bright ray of sunshine for the hockey world. Some of these happened in 2019, technically, but close enough to now that they fall within the last 12 months:

  • This happened in November 2019, so not technically in 2020, but recent enough I wanted to include: that whole Don Cherry thing.
  • Akim Aliu and his history of dealing with racism, namely from Bill Peters.
  • Mike Babcock’s mind games with Mitch Marner.
  • Brendan Leipsic essentially getting kicked out of the league when his toxic DMs on teammates and their significant others came out.
  • Daniel Carcillo’s various accounts of how messed up hockey culture is, including what he himself admits he participated in.
  • The lawsuit that Carcillo and others have filed against the CHL for their inaction in dealing with extreme hazing and abuse.
  • Former NHL-er Jeremy Roenick fired over sexual comments he made on a female co-worker.
  • The explosion of protests and the Black Lives Matter movement around the start of the pandemic, and how the NHL responded to it and the Hockey Diversity Alliance (HDA).
  • Dealing with Donald Trump’s family praising the NHL for lagging behind other leagues on social matters.
  • Dealing with the fallout of not suspending their games the same day as the WNBA, NBA and other leagues.
  • Dealing with the PR battle with the HDA on matters of making the league more diverse, including the eventual severance of official ties between the two.
  • Mike Milbury.
  • Eric Guest, former OHL player, and his various accounts of the bullying, abuse and drug use he experienced as a teenager while on the Kitchener Rangers.
  • Just this past week, The Athletic published a piece “Why do so few women work in sports radio?” that led to one hockey writer getting fired from two different scouting outlets, and a TSN Radio guy getting flamed for their remarks claiming women just aren’t interested. /

There’s probably even more than this, maybe even double the points, and I just can’t remember because there was just a lot of them and 2020 has been... A LOT.

Well, over the weekend the newest story of horror about hockey culture came out. CBC published an article about a video that had been discovered about teenage boys were playing this bizarre and violent game against their own teammate who wound up having a seizure.

I don’t even have any words to comment on this. This new incident is horrifying. Everything else I listed above it are horrifying. At what point do we stop thinking of these as isolated incidents and start realizing that they’re symptoms?

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