The league, naturally, rushed to embrace its rare moment in the zeitgeist, sharing the video bright and early the next morning. Not only was a cool person talking about hockey, a cool Black person was talking about hockey. Literally overnight, Lazlo Holmes, a fictional character, became hockey’s Black Friend.
Leave it to the NHL to think it’s in on the joke when it’s quite clearly the butt of the joke.
Let’s do that hockey! @DraftKings | #DETvsNSH pic.twitter.com/NMyhXLKCjp
— Nashville Predators (@PredsNHL) February 11, 2021
The whole point of the SNL skit was to underscore how hockey is almost exclusively White, and has utterly failed to make any significant inroads into Black culture. The skit’s funny, for sure. But it’s laughing at you as a hockey league and as a hockey fan, not with you.
It’s not news that hockey has a diversity problem, of course. You can see the ground that the sport has to make up by going to any hockey rink, not just an NHL rink. Less than 5 percent of the league is Black. Just 17 months ago, 105 years into the league’s history, the Tampa Bay Lightning iced the first all-Black line. Hockey’s whiteness is self-evident. So is its maleness. The league has rightly crowed about having six women in assistant general manager roles this season, but up until this past year, there had been just one: Anaheim’s Angela Gorgone way back in 1996.
The league finally put some numbers to that glaring homogeneity on Tuesday, releasing its first diversity and inclusion report, which was spurred on by the societal reckoning in the summer of 2020 in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, and the subsequent formation of the Hockey Diversity Alliance. The simple fact that the NFL, NBA and MLB all have long-existing websites devoted to their DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) initiatives and track records — the NFL has easily searchable DEI data available dating back to 2013 — illustrates just how painfully behind the social curve the NHL is.
And the numbers themselves, well, they’re every bit as bad as you’d expect them to be.According to the report, 83.6 percent of league and team employees identify as White, with just 3.74 percent identifying as Black, 3.71 percent as Hispanic/Latino and 4.17 percent as Asian. Meanwhile, 36.81 percent of the league employees are women, and less than 4 percent of the league identifies as LGBTQ+.
 |
| NBA Diversity Grade: A+! |
For comparison’s sake, here are some numbers from the other major sports leagues.
As of last year, in the NBA, per the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport: 82.4 percent of the players were people of color, fully half the coaches and half the general managers were people of color, and 32.5 percent of senior management were people of color.