Highlights: Rainbow-colored Pride Tape has been part of pro ice hockey for seven years, symbolizing the sport’s pledge to be welcoming and inclusive. But the NHL has banned the athletic tape, quickly sparking a backlash.
“I’ll use the tape — if I have to buy it myself, I will,” Philadelphia Flyers forward Scott Laughton said on Wednesday, discussing how he would mark his team’s Pride Night.
The NHL announced over the summer that its players will no longer wear special jerseys during warmups to mark “theme nights,” when teams show support for a variety of groups, from the LGBTQ+ community to Indigenous groups, the military, and people fighting cancer. But as the NHL prepared to start a new season, it sent a memo announcing the ban also applies to Pride Tape.
The abrupt shift came after several NHL players made headlines last season for refusing to wear Pride Night themed jerseys, citing religious or other reasons.
The multicolored Pride Tape quickly became an “ingrained part of hockey culture” — and that quote comes from the NHL’s own website, in a story from 2021.
Pride Tape was backed by a Kickstarter campaign in 2015, as a simple way to encourage LGBTQ+ youth to get involved in team sports.
It’s one thing to not do pride jerseys anymore. It’s a whole other level of fucked up that they are banning fucking tape. This is basically saying they do not want any openly LGBTQ players or allies of them.
That’s not at all what they’re saying. This is the fault of the Twitter crowd who harassed the league about players who didn’t want to wear the jersey’s in warm ups.
Twitter made such a massive deal about 2-3 players not wearing the jersey and turned what was supposed to be a great thing for the lgbtq community, with hundreds of players wearing them proudly into a shit storm of negativity.
Unfortunately, this put the league in a really impossible spot. Either they allow the twitter mob to blow the situation way out of proportion with negativity surrounding these inclusivity celebrations or they would have to mandate players wear them and punish them for not wearing them.
That would likely lead to problems with the union, possible issues with the next CBA and possibly lost season(s).
What we should learn from this, I think, is to just ignore people who have dumb beliefs and celebrate the ones who have it right.
Instead of making fringe players like provorov or Reimer the entirety of the publicity and the story and amplifying them, we should be talking about the actual GOATs proudly wearing them and turning it into a positive thing for the league.
McDavid, Crosby, Ovechkin, Matthews, Mackinnon, etc
Amplify the fact that the best of the best players in the world want everyone to feel included.
I feel bad for the league, they obviously wanted to do these things, they did them for years, until it turned into really really bad press for the league.