The NHL is a very conservative league–I don’t necessarily mean politically conservative, but simply a reluctance to change, and when they do change it’s incremental. This can be very frustrating when it comes to how the game is managed, but on the business side it’s an understandable caution for what remains a regional sport. Given that, I was initially surprised to learn that the league is going to step away from putting political symbols on jerseys for next season. This clearly wasn’t intended as some sort of statement, or simply a result of opposition from a few Russian Orthodox players (other religious denominations could oppose it as well, eg, but in the NHL that’s the only group I’m aware of refusing to wear jerseys). I think where this decision comes from is another tenant of the NHL: risk averse. The league has watched what’s happened to Bud Light (whose demographics at least superficially echo the NHL’s, and absolutely where they’d like the game to be more popular). Bud hasn’t found a way out of their merchandising disaster, so the NHL decided they were better off not taking that risk (it should be emphasized this is about the American market). Pride jerseys were empty virtue signaling anyway and not a key component of marketing. While for Anheuser-Busch, the failure of one brand (Bud) is disappointing, it’s something they can move on from without much trouble, but the NHL has no such flexibility: if people turn away from the league it would face contraction (folding of franchises)–there’s no apparent loss in moving away from the jerseys, so why take the risk? This should make apparent to fans, if it wasn’t already from Bud, Target, Starbucks, and so forth, that none of this means anything to those companies. It’s just marketing and the moment it stops working, it’s removed. Investing energy in top-down approval is a fools errand.

When looking for outrage from the Ottawa fan community I was surprised to see nothing at first–no articles from The Silver Seven (they waited for two days), Senshot, not the HFBoards, and even most Twitter feeds were silent (nothing from Nichols, Ary, etc; Travis Yost is the exception, but it’s one lazy Tweet–see below). TSN initially only ran the AP-story and both it and the follow-up a day later are buried deep on their page. The local collective silence is much louder than Pierre McGuire‘s faux pas back in 2019, as that did resonate with traditional media for five-seconds (now completely forgotten and not brought up during his tenure with the franchise). This is remarkable in this space, since it’s not that long ago it would have blown up everywhere.

Yost’s take is particularly ridiculous (the NBA has more success because of jerseys? Doesn’t the WNBA do the same thing?–correlation is causation for Travis). I’ve mentioned before that Yost seems to have closed the door on being anything other than ‘the stats guy’, but he had an opportunity here to delve into the issue Andrew-style (wtf happened to Andrew anyway?) and try to make an argument. One could argue (correctly) this approach is good for his job security, but I credit this with being Yost’s actual opinion rather than just scoring social credit points. One thing Beata (above) correctly identifies is the current cultural shift (albeit she would have made the same arguments years before the shift happened, so is it awareness or coincidence?). One of the interesting things not reflected on by either is that acceptance of LGBTQ+ is going down as pushes for it have increased. It’s hard not to believe that they genuinely think corporations and the military industrial complex (who promote and participate in this) share their concerns. To my mind there are much more successful approaches to building tolerance (which is what the community was doing when I was growing up) and that’s a positive bottom-up approach rather than 1%ers screaming at the peasants.

Regardless, as a marketing move it’s a smart one from the NHL. The backlash they’ve received has been minimal and is meaningless to their bottomline, while it avoids offending markets they are pursuing. For the community, there’s clearly less juice in the system to fire up the fans to be offended by it. No one is making an argument about ethics or efficacy, so I won’t address them, but I find it all fascinating.

This article was written by Peter Levi

June 24, 2023
Categories: Ottawa Senators . . Author: Eye on the Sens

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