Bruce Arthur: NHL players, Black and white, stand together for justice. It’s exactly what the sport has always needed

They had just awoken from naps. That was one defence, when players were asked why the NHL played hockey while the other sports sat. The NBA had staged a wildcat strike for racial justice Wednesday, and other leagues had followed. But not the NHL. The reasoning of Philadelphia coach Alain Vigneault was, “I have no idea what’s going on in the outside world. We’re in this bubble right now.”

That’s hockey, all right. And then Thursday, NHL players decided to postpone playoff games for two days as part of the same moment, the same fight. Thursday, finally, some part of hockey awoke.

“Last night I struggled with what I wanted to do, whether it was: Am I really going to walk out on my team, and be the only guy, or were there a couple guys? ” said Vegas Golden Knights forward Ryan Reaves, who is Black and a member of the Hockey Diversity Alliance. “But I woke up with a text from (Tampa Bay defenceman) Kevin Shattenkirk and he had a bunch of guys out East there, and they wanted to talk. And then I got a text saying Vancouver wanted to talk.

“And that, I think, was more powerful. That the conversation started with white players on other teams wanting to talk, and I think that’s the most powerful thing that happened today.”

You can dismiss this, if you want. You can say hockey was late, and it was. You can say postponing two days of playoff games is merely following the crowd, after players drove postponements in the NBA, WNBA, Major League Baseball, Major League Soccer and pro tennis, in response to the police shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wis. The NBA players led.

That hockey players followed, even a day later, was the pleasing, overdue shock. For the most part hockey is a white sport, for white people. Most of all, hockey demands conformity, and never more than from people who don’t already look like everyone else.

But this week white NHL players, en masse, asked Black players what they thought, and that is a transformative moment. In 2017, I asked Devante Smith-Pelly, then of the Washington Capitals, what it was like to be a Black hockey player.

“I can’t go to anyone on my team and have them understand really how it is to be in my shoes,” Smith-Pelly said. “Just because I’m a professional hockey player, they just don’t understand. So it’s really lonely in that sense. You don’t really have anyone.”

Less than a month ago, Minnesota’s Matt Dumba gave a speech at centre ice about racial equality, and then he knelt alone with Black players standing at his shoulders. Reaves knelt during an anthem, accompanied by white teammate Robin Lehner, and Jason Dickinson and Tyler Seguin of the Dallas Stars. Some players put out statements, and one thread ran through them: I don’t know enough, I haven’t experienced this, I want to listen, I want to learn.

On Thursday, the hockey world saw Reaves and fellow HDA member Nazem Kadri and Pierre-Edouard Bellemare, both of the Colorado Avalanche, standing alongside white players Bo Horvat of Vancouver and Dickinson, with about every player in the Western pandemic bubble in Edmonton standing behind them, in support.

That was a moment. Hockey leapt.

“I think the message coming from a predominantly white league has a lot bigger impact — not bigger impact, but it has a very strong impact when it’s coming from players like this,” said Reaves. “Most of these guys have never lived through some of the stuff that Black athletes have. They don’t go through those day-to-day things (where) they feel that racism, or they’ve seen racism, or their family’s gone through it.

“For them to say look, we see what’s going on in society and we disagree with it and something has to change right now, that was my message. I said that standing together here, it’s more powerful than anything we can do. We’re in a bubble. There’s nothing you can do outside the bubble right now. And we can’t change anything because we’re stuck in here. But together in here, right now, that’s what we can do.

“The statement they’ve made today is something that’s going to last. These two days aren’t going to fix anything, but the conversation and the statement that’s been made is very powerful, especially coming from this league.”

Especially coming from this league. The Hockey Diversity Alliance is driving the bus here, and that matters. The organization has negotiated with the NHL on next steps regarding the league and a vocal fight against racism, but negotiations haven’t moved quickly. In this case, players listened to players. The HDA — Akim Aliu, Evander Kane, Dumba, Kadri, Trevor Daley, Anthony Duclair, Wayne Simmonds, Chris Stewart, Joel Ward — is driving the sport to less comfortable places.

“Moving forward, it’s going to have to be the whole league,” said Kadri. “Collectively, not just one or two guys.”

And if you actually want hockey to be for everyone, it’s good for hockey to be uncomfortable for a while. The NHL has avoided saying Black Lives Matter, preferring a fill-in-the-blank hashtag, We Skate For (Black Lives). The last three Stanley Cup champions visited the Trump White House. The Trump family vocally appreciated the NHL not kneeling during the anthem, while players of colour in the NHL, from Dumba to Kadri to Kane, said they wished the league would do more. That, for the league, was a choice.

And so was this. Maybe it is a one-time thing, a Band-Aid, and hockey reflexively snaps back. Will players reflect on the fact that if you are a player of colour, you heard racial slurs as a matter of course, growing up in the game? Will fans? Will the people who love this game realize how much greater it would be if they worked to share it? The fact that the conversation is happening at all in this game is the win, in some ways, and that’s OK. Hockey could be so much more of a welcoming sport, and culture. It would make the game so much more.

Well, on Thursday, NHL players stood together because enough of them believed Black lives matter, and that was something new. The NHL has slept comfortably in its sleepy small town for a long time. It was nice, even for a moment, to see them wake up.