Don’t Put Hockey in the Culture-War Penalty Box

Recently, NBC News political reporter Allan Smith argued that conservatives were turning the National Hockey League into one of their newest battlefronts in the culture war. In reality, the conservative reaction to the NHL’s initiatives is a response to the Left’s culture-war aggression, which is what thrust the league into the spotlight in the first place.

Before the 2020 resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement, the NHL and its teams were generally silent on social issues. However, since then, the league has been pressured into a more proactive approach to fixing cultural problems in the sport, such as its supposed past shortcomings concerning inclusivity.