A day after sitting on their hands while other Leagues postpone games over the shooting of Jacob Blake, the NHL has decided to postpone games Thursday.
Various reports suggested Thursday the NHL is moving towards postponing playoff games after experiencing a ton of backlash from players, fans, and the media alike.
Minnesota’s Matt Dumba tweeted Thursday that the Hockey Diversity Alliance announced that they “formally requested” the NHL “suspend” all playoff games Thursday in an effort to send a message that “human rights takes a priority over sports”.
The NHL was the only of the five major sports leagues in the United States and Canada to not have some kind of postponements as a result of the Blake shooting. Tuesday, the Detroit Lions announced that they would cancel their practice citing that football “wasn’t important” that day.
Meanwhile Wednesday a series of wild cat strikes took over the NBA and WNBA.
The Milwaukee Bucks drew headlines saying that they would not participate in their game against the Orlando Magic from the NBA bubble. In fact, the Bucks offered to forfeit their game against Orlando which the Magic refused and instead joined their NBA counterparts. Soon after the rest of the teams scheduled to tip announced they would join the strike and the NBA was forced to postpone the playoffs.
In the WNBA, players on the Washington Mystics came out wearing shirts with seven holes on the back signifying the seven times an unarmed Blake was shot by the police.
After the WNBA and NBA taking a lead on game postponements, other leagues took note in the MLB and MLS.
The NHL on the other hand decided to deploy meaningless words saying they would have a “moment of reflection” while former players and commentators like Kelly Hrudy discussed how he was “disappointed” that they were talking about hockey games right now and that the NHL “missed out” on the opportunity to essentially show solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement.
Now in some sense this may be a better late than never move by the NHL but it certainly does rein a little hollow considering it was more reactionary than anything else as a result of the rightful backlash from their initial lackluster response.