Hockey, Media, and the Ukraine Crisis

On the two very long weeks on Hockey Twitter

Author’s Note:  Two things. 1) I am anti-imperialist and anti-war. Don’t even try me. 2) I want to make it abundantly clear that what I’m going to talk about today is not an analysis of a very complex and nuanced geopolitical situation. This is a newsletter about hockey though, so I’m going to talk about how this crisis has affected the sport.  

If there’s one thing hockey is going to do is take a serious socio-political matter and make it as one-dimensional as possible. In the past two weeks, as the conflict between Ukraine and Russia continued to escalate, we saw different organizations within the sport come out and react to it. For those who’ve missed it, here are some highlights:

• The Canadian Hockey League banned 16 and 17-year-old Russian and Belarusian prospects from their upcoming draft. Quite bold for an organization that was just forced to release a report on the severity of misconduct off-ice.
  Daniel Wagner wrote a good overview on the issue