I promised a blog on this subject during the season, and here it is.

I’m going to try to discuss a sometimes touchy subject: race in sports and in the NHL, in particular.

Please, in your responses on the message board, try to keep it civil and non-accusatory.

Unless I’m mistaken, with the recent signing of free agent Nigel Dawes, the Thrashers might be the first NHL club with three players of African descent on their roster. If there’s been another, someone let me know. Doesn’t really matter. And I’ll come back to the Thrashers, their roster and what it means in the city of Atlanta in a minute.

Now, this is not about quotas or equal opportunity.

It is about the sport I love and its future.

It’s about marketing and expansion of the game (in a meaningful way, not just throwing teams in heretofore non-hockey markets because they fit some economic formula of Gary Bettman’s device).

It’s about the NHL waking up and realizing what’s happening in North America as a whole, and some people putting aside some long-held biases and ignorance.

For some time, I felt Bettman’s expansion criteria were fundamentally flawed. Yes, there are always the economics in a given market that have to be considered (the building, the predicted attendance, corporate sponsorship).

But in life, and in business especially, if your brand isn’t growing, it’s dying.

The fact is, Asian, African and Hispanic populations are growing faster as segments of the overall population in North America than Europeans.

And that’s why my belief is, and has been, that the NHL needs to expand culturally and demographically (in a big way).

Let’s face it, it is the whitest of the Big 4 professional sports— by far.

Sure, there are many other factors, but I will submit to you that on many (and some of them subtle) levels, the NHL is not connecting with significant and growing segments of the population because they don’t relate to the faces they see in NHL uniforms.

Hockey’s a great sport to watch. The greatest sport to watch. And with that in mind, it is perhaps a bit of a shame that non-whites relate more so to those of their backgrounds (but tons of market and behavioral research proves that to be the case— so there it is).

But it is an even bigger shame that hockey has failed to progress to the point where it can connect with these audiences.

Yes, there are cultural and economic barriers to initiating hockey in the neighborhoods where African and Hispanic kids live (a disproportionate amount of them are poor, lack ice rinks, etc.)

But more poor kids (generally speaking) play hockey in Canada. Why? There are lots of reasons.

One is: hockey matters as much to poor kids as it does to rich kids in Canada.

Enter the Atlanta Thrashers. I don’t know if marketing this team in an essentially non-hockey market, where they’ve struggled to gain any kind of stable foothold, has anything to do with the acquisitions of Evander Kane, Dustin Byfuglien and Dawes.

But having lived in Atlanta briefly in the 70s and 80s, I can tell you it has a very large, and increasingly affluent, African American population.

For that reason, I believe that if the Thrashers are an exciting team to watch, and that excitement is keyed by players like Kane and Byfuglien, you are going to see more black faces in attendance at Thrashers games than at any other NHL arenas.

You’re going to see more endorsement opportunities in Atlanta for Kane, Byfuglien, Dawes and any other African players the Thrashers add. Byfuglien, by himself is a larger than life, charismatic kid with an infectious smile and a great sense of humor.

You’re going to see, finally, some meaningful penetration of the African-American market by the NHL for the first time.

And it’s not really about altruism (though, in my heart, I think it would be great). It is very much about the future and the economics of the game.

Hockey Is For Everyone is a great NHL program. But it seems to be a relatively small one in terms of the effort the NHL (and the AHL) need to be making to expand the game.

Perhaps the NHL does have a plan to invest serious dollars in making ice rinks and ice time more accessible to minorities (especially in the U.S.). Because, again, if the game is going to grow, it can’t do so by gaining (if gaining at all) a larger share of a shrinking segment of the overall populace.

In the meantime, I’m rooting for the Thrashers. I hope, for the same reasons, some of you will, too.

Thanks for reading,

JJ

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