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.
I’m really mad I learned Provorov is a homophobe after I got his jersey. The NHL is spineless
I am not a sports person (other than the occasional soccer match), but aren’t all of them (nhl, nfl, nba, mlb) spineless?
MLB has been pretty good LGBT support wise and the NBA is pretty good too minus some of their China hand waving. At the end of the day they’re all corporate and thus amoral but I still think there’s a spectrum in terms of actions, even if the motive is financial.
NBA is the leader. Not perfect but far and away the best.
The NBA tries to be “woke” to appeal to the kids. They pushed out a team owner who was openly racist. They don’t seem to tolerate racist and homophobic jears from fans.
Most of the players are black, so they don’t expect them not to comment on BLM or to all stand for the national anthem. They have had some problems with players being anti-Semitic, they have punished them enough to get them to keep their mouth shut.
Wear it with rainbow spandex tights.
Sell it. It’ll lose them a sale, and you won’t need to keep it.
Unfortunately he got traded so I don’t think anyone wants it. I’ll wait for someone to take his old number and do a nameplate change, I’ve seen pretty decent replacement ones from China.
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.
An older comment of mine with a few new things added:
Common Bettman L.
Dude really just said fuck it, I am gonna die of old age in 10 years anyway, fuck the future.
Now the NHL has banned pro LGBTQ messaging, there are animated digital board ads during play, ads on helmets, ads on jerseys, gambling commercials, commentators talking about betting odds, embedded commercials during play, and still no reasonable means of legally streaming NHL games. Not to mention the snail’s pace of the ongoing Hockey Canada sexual assault investigation (seriously, are they hoping everyone is just going to forget about this?), the hypocritical RNG state of the Department of Player Safety, and the NHL’s tiptoeing around concussions and CTE. All under Bettman’s watch.
Gary needs to go.
If your personal beliefs lead you to disrespect another group of people then your beliefs should be shown nothing but disrespect in return.
I have lots of friends who are religious and they’re all totally fine with me being gay and transgender, and they love and support the pride moment, as do the churches they belong to. I have no problem with religion or personal beliefs, but I won’t tolerate any belief that won’t tolerate me just existing in the same world as them.
The churches are ok with it? I thought religion dictates that if you are gay you will burn in hell for eternity?
Only the ones that like to ignore the bit about “Jesus Saves”; which nowadays is a lot of them.
Edit: the sane churches are the ones that say, “god gave us a brain, that means he wants us to use it”; the ones that show up on the news all the time are the ones that say, “god gave us a brain so Satan could tempt us.”
I don’t go to church alot, but when I do i attend an Episcopal church with two reverends, one gay, one a woman. They sell shirts in the gift shop that say things like “I’m Episcopalian because it’s okay to believe in dinosaurs”.
United Church seems fine
Several Anglican churches are Catholics with gays and women leaders.
Cognitove dissonence.
I don’t think James Reimer doesn’t want you to exist.
I seriously doubt you knew who James Reimer was until someone complained about him on Twitter, honestly.
Did you notice that the best hockey player in the wold was supporting you though? Because if that was the conversation you were having about this, instead of saying a couple medicocre NHL players have closed minded views, you’d probably have felt a lot happier about the situation then and now, and the league would probably still be having players do pre-skates with pride jerseys on the ice.
Who gives a fuck about what provorov thinks. Connor Mcdavid is the mother fucking GOAT
Older fans like the decision. The players and the younger fans do not.
What are you talking about? The NHL is the most inclusive of all professional sports. They welcome everyone from all sorts of backgrounds. They’re the inclusivest!
Was downvoting … until “inclusivest”.
Lol
It’s the little things. I guess people don’t pick up on them often.
I use /s so it’s clear.
Sarcasm is easy to miss (imo anyway, cause I miss it often).
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Why are all these homophs afraid of gays?
This means we’re allowed to drag them behind cars until they stop moving. (The homophobe, not the car)
Never let a person with prejudice have a voice or a pulse.
Is this satire, or…?
This guy’s HUNTS criminals. He’s kind of a badass.
It’s a little bit Alexis.
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