In current media environment, retired NHL star P.K. Subban’s conservative pivot a savvy business move

You could take the savviest brand manager on the planet, double dose them on melatonin, add a mug of chamomile tea, usher them into a cool bedroom and put them to sleep beneath a weighted blanket, and they still wouldn’t dream up the media relations winning streak P.K. Subban has been on since last week.

First, the retired NHL star appeared on ESPN’s two big morning talk shows, Get Up and First Take, to deliver scathing takes about the softness of modern NBA players, and their selfishness compared with the team-first tough guys populating the NHL. And, as often happens when a high-profile Black person takes another group of Black folks to task in public, those comments were replayed, reshared and aggregated all across the Internet, racking up engagements on social media and spawning a whole new cycle of news.

Tuesday, Subban joined retired NBAer Matt Barnes on All The Smoke to discuss his NBA thoughts further.

Here I am talking about it. Now, so are you. Tomorrow, it’ll be somebody else.

You can’t build a whole career out of a run of publicity like this, but it can set up the next phase of your media life. And Subban’s recent public support of U.S. President Donald Trump hints at where this all might be headed.

Since taking office Trump has made clear that the era of DEI, or wokeness, or any other euphemism for Blackness, is over. While private companies hustle to toe his anti-diversity line, the newly-minted Department of Government Efficiency takes a chainsaw to federal agencies, idling thousands of workers, and eliminating the jobs that helped create and sustain a thriving Black middle class.

In the media industry, we know which way the wind is blowing — straight into the faces of outspoken, progressive-leaning journalists of colour. Check out the roster of non-white talent MSNBC jettisoned last week. Joy Ann Reid, Jonathan Capehart, Katie Phang, Ayman Mohyeldin — all either jobless or demoted.

Against that backdrop, Subban didn’t just turn lazy and shopworn anti-Black sports tropes into a successful play for attention. He took a big step toward creating a lucrative role for himself in a downsizing media industry, where there’s always a microphone and a platform for a charismatic, opinionated Black person ready to scold the Black rank-and-file over perceived shortcomings.

As for the facts in Subban’s initial rant? They don’t matter. Welcome, again, to the post-truth era.

“These fans in here are paying $2,500 a ticket. Five grand … Blue-collared, hard-working people,” Subban said on one of his First Take segments. “[NBA players] gotta understand the importance of showing up to the all-star game and being on the court, and playing banged up.”

Subban is free to think that everyday people are putting in 10-hour shifts at the Amazon warehouse then dropping $5,000 US on a single NBA ticket, just to have LeBron James — the only big-name NBA star to sit out the All-Star game — disappoint them by resting his 40-year-old joints. But in this scenario, one of these wealthy athletes seems completely out of touch with normal folks’ finances.

And it’s not James.

Following a familiar script

News coverage on the U.S. economy will tell you that the average American is more concerned with the cost of eggs (up 40 per cent this year) than with getting full value for the $20,000 US they allegedly, hypothetically, spent on family night at the Lakers game.

The rest of the talking points are at once earnest and uninspired, passionate but dependent on tired clichés we normally recognize as racial code words. In political coverage, the term “blue collar” is often a stand-in for “white.”

While we could dismiss the racial makeup of the two leagues as a coincidence — the tough and selfless NHL is 90 per cent white, while the lazy and entitled NBA is three-quarters Black — the whole argument follows a familiar script that applies to a broad range of sports. When high school track coaches complain that “sprinters” are lazy, they don’t mean Coby Hilton.

But in Subban’s telling, James is the lazy one. The league’s all-time leader in minutes played, who spends seven figures annually fine-tuning his body, and whose 287 career playoff games are the equivalent of 3.5 extra seasons, embodies modern NBA softness because he skipped an all-star game.

The argument doesn’t make sense, but to gain traction it doesn’t need to. It just needs to tap into a pre-existing beef a lot of sports fans have with the imagined entitlement of NBA players. Basketball players are portrayed as uniquely dismissive of their all-star duties, even though the NHL cooked up the Four Nations tournament as the cure to a familiar problem.

Nobody liked its all-star game.

Minding a media brand

A clear double standard, but it helps that the criticism comes from Subban, who is smart and Black, with unimpeachable pro sports credentials and a pro wrestler’s flair for cutting a promo.

It all bodes well for his media brand, as does his post-rant embrace of a U.S. president with a long history of anti-Black actions, and a fresh new batch of anti-Black policies. A person committed to seeing the best in the U.S. president might ask how a politician who poses for pictures with Subban, Tiger Woods and a lengthy list of misogynist rappers can actually traffic in anti-Blackness.

The answer is easily, just like he can hang out with Wayne Gretzky but still threaten to annex Canada. 

It’s not even clear what Canada would receive in this merger besides higher unemployment, skyrocketing grocery costs, and an earnest attempt to roll race relations back to the 1940s.

That landscape doesn’t make room for many Black voices in the press, but there’s always space for a few who are willing to wag their fingers at the broader Black community. Conservative media spaces have been cycling through those types longer than I’ve been alive.

Yesterday’s Larry Elder is today’s Candace Owens; 2007’s Jason Whitlock is 2024’s Emmanuel Acho, and could be 2025’s P.K. Subban.

If he wants to travel that sports media lane, I don’t begrudge him.

In fact, I empathize.

We’re all seeking stability in a volatile industry, and, like a younger, hockey-playing Subban, I know how it feels to be misunderstood as a standout Black performer in largely white workplaces. We’ve both been labelled arrogant or ungrateful, when the real offence was being great at the job and refusing to apologize for it. 

He’s always been a better athlete than I am, but this past week has highlighted another key difference between us.

He’s also a better businessman.