What The Well-Dressed Kraken WON'T Be Wearing This Year

When the Seattle Kraken host "Theme Nights" this season, something important will be missing.

As a reminder, here's how CBC reported the specialty sweater ban. "NHL teams won't wear special jerseys for pregame warmups during themed nights next season, the result of a handful of players refusing to use rainbow-coloured Pride jerseys this past season and causing unwelcome distractions."

Last season, the Kraken held eight "Theme" games in which the team skated in specially-designed sweaters during warm-ups. This year, Seattle will host the same eight promotions at Climate Pledge Arena, but without players skating in themed colors.

Photographer extraordinaire Caroline Anne of Come As You Are Hockey kindly shared snaps from last year's warm-ups. Above, goalie Philipp Grubauer, resplendent on "Pride Night." Below, stylish Will Borgen on "Green Night." Further down the page, Oliver Bjorkstrand rocking the butterfly "S" on "Women In Hockey Night."

Here's the bottom line - literally, the bottom line: the NHL must put its money where its mouth is. If "Hockey Is For Everyone" is to be more than a clever marketing slogan, the NHL can send a clear message by reversing its warm-up sweater ban.

There are just two opposing forces here: making money vs. doing the right thing. It isn't credible for the NHL to claim the sweaters are a "distraction." Sports leagues live with, even create, plenty of uncomfortable distractions. You better believe sports leagues, teams, and owners play, and play to win, in the political arena.

If a small percentage of players and hangers-on - closed-minded at best, bigoted at worst - crassly object to the visibility granted certain groups, team owners care mostly if it affects their bottom line. The sweater ban was imposed because the NHL power structure feared advertisers might grumble, TV ratings might suffer, gate receipts might fall.

Regardless of any temporary impact to the bottom line, doing the right thing MUST win the day. The powerful - in this case, the NHL and its owners - have a moral imperative to assist the less fortunate. By necessity, this means turning a blind eye to bigots and malcontents.

Look at the groups on this "Theme Games" list: Women, Blacks, LGBTQ, Asian, and Indigenous people. What they have in common is generations of suffering abuse, neglect, and marginalization. (That goes for Mother Earth, too.) 

Themed sweaters, in their own small way, bring attention to the continuing inequity endured by these groups. The hope being that awareness motivates a groundswell of support, which in turn contributes to substantive change.

If wearing those sweaters, if seeing those sweaters from the stands or on TV, makes certain people uncomfortable, well, that's part of the point. The privileged can no longer insist on being shielded from the life and death struggles of those pushed to the margins of society.

Team owners and leagues, to their credit, have allowed use of their platforms to generate awareness among a large, captive, and engaged audience marginalized groups could never otherwise reach. If the owners do it because it's good business as well as good public policy, who cares. 

What does matter is that they don't backtrack now.