Highlights: Rainbow-colored Pride Tape has been part of pro ice hockey for seven years, symbolizing the sport’s pledge to be welcoming and inclusive. But the NHL has banned the athletic tape, quickly sparking a backlash.
“I’ll use the tape — if I have to buy it myself, I will,” Philadelphia Flyers forward Scott Laughton said on Wednesday, discussing how he would mark his team’s Pride Night.
The NHL announced over the summer that its players will no longer wear special jerseys during warmups to mark “theme nights,” when teams show support for a variety of groups, from the LGBTQ+ community to Indigenous groups, the military, and people fighting cancer. But as the NHL prepared to start a new season, it sent a memo announcing the ban also applies to Pride Tape.
The abrupt shift came after several NHL players made headlines last season for refusing to wear Pride Night themed jerseys, citing religious or other reasons.
The multicolored Pride Tape quickly became an “ingrained part of hockey culture” — and that quote comes from the NHL’s own website, in a story from 2021.
Pride Tape was backed by a Kickstarter campaign in 2015, as a simple way to encourage LGBTQ+ youth to get involved in team sports.
An older comment of mine with a few new things added:
Common Bettman L.
Dude really just said fuck it, I am gonna die of old age in 10 years anyway, fuck the future.
Now the NHL has banned pro LGBTQ messaging, there are animated digital board ads during play, ads on helmets, ads on jerseys, gambling commercials, commentators talking about betting odds, embedded commercials during play, and still no reasonable means of legally streaming NHL games. Not to mention the snail’s pace of the ongoing Hockey Canada sexual assault investigation (seriously, are they hoping everyone is just going to forget about this?), the hypocritical RNG state of the Department of Player Safety, and the NHL’s tiptoeing around concussions and CTE. All under Bettman’s watch.
Gary needs to go.