Hockey has long been considered a
white sport. The fact is: it costs thousands to fund a child who has even a budding
interest to play this sport. Then kids start growing, and they need to buy
another round of protective gear. With the new carbon fiber sticks, priced
around $200, they’ll be able to shoot harder only at the risk of breaking
easier. So there’s another couple hundred.
Few families in any social class or
any race can afford to buy the required gear. So the predominantly white,
middle to high class tend to have the best chance of playing professionally.
The NHL likes to compare Willie O’Ree, the first black hockey player, to Jackie
Robinson. They tend to skip over the fact that O’Ree only played 6 games
professionally, and scored even fewer points. Since then, only a handful of
non-white players have had extended runs in the NHL.
Enter the 2010-2011 Atlanta
Thrashers. With only one playoff appearance and only filling only a portion of
their stadium’s seats, the team was in peril. So with this glaring gap in their market, how
could the Thrashers, playing in a city where 54% of the population was black, raise
their abysmal attendance? They didn’t sign any marquee players. They didn’t
even try to win more games.
They just traded for as many of the
black players in the league as they could.
Free agent prospects Nigel Dawes
and Anthony Stewart were signed during the offseason. Ilya Kovalchuk, their Lebron James if you
will, was traded for Johnny Oduya, a couple of picks, and a utility player. Dustin Byfuglien and Akim Aliu were involved
in large trade with the Chicago Blackhawks. Already playing for the Thrashers were draft
picks Evander Kane and Sebastian Owuya. When all was said and done, the Atlanta
Thrashers now possessed 20% of all black players in the NHL, all of them acquired
within one season.
The
players, coaches, and GM all downplayed the situation. GM Rick Dudley maintained
that “it wasn’t like we went out and tried to pick up black players.” But it didn’t
take a statistician to learn that the Thrashers were ranked 28th of
30 teams in terms of attendance. This was a poor performing franchise, and
nobody wants to pay to watch their team lose every game.
And so
we come to the titular gambit. Whether or not you believe that GM Rick Dudley
was telling the truth, the fact was he made a bunch of moves to pick up a bunch
of players who just so happen to be black. The problem was that most of these
players just so happened to not be very good. Aliu, Owuya, and Dawes were almost
immediately sent back down to their farm team after poor performances, and
Oduya’s playing time was kept to a minimum. The Thrashers finished fourth out
of five in their division, and sold even less of their stadium’s seats than the
prior year.
The
gambit failed so miserably that the team was promptly sold at the end of the
season, and so the franchise moved to Winnipeg, Canada. GM Rick Dudley, as well as
the entire coaching staff, were all fired. Only two of the black players
returned the next season; the rest were traded or lost to free agency. That season may soon be lost in hockey lore. Maybe it actually was all just a weird coincidence or maybe Rick Dudley was just really bad at his job. One thing is undoubtedly true: whatever was tried just didn't work.
Sources:
http://sports.yahoo.com/nhl/blog/puck_daddy/post/Thrashers-not-trying-to-exploit-black-players-?urn=nhl-280435
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/28/sports/hockey/28nyrangers.html
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