The All-Time Black Hockey Team

The World Cup of Hockey was recently completed, and like I hoped, the free thinking that decided which teams would participate paid off.

It included most of the national teams we are used to seeing at the top of international tournaments -- namely, Canada, the USA, Russia, Sweden, Finland, and the Czech Republic -- but the NHL got creative by adding a Team Europe and Team North America to the mix. The former consisted of players from European countries not named above, and the latter was a youngsters squad comprised only of Canadians and Americans age 23 or younger (three of its players are still in their teens).

Team Europe made it all the way to the final before falling to Canada. Team North America made waves by clobbering Finland and knocking off Sweden in OT. Chalk two up for thinking out of the box.

Part of me wanted to welcome the World Cup by writing blog posts about what I consider to be each country's all-time national team, putting players from different generations on the same roster. I never got around to that, but in the wake of the World Cup, and while enjoying the start of the NHL season, an out-of-the-box idea has risen in my mind: Why not name an all-time black hockey team?

Hockey has long been considered a white sport and many people today still think of it that way. But there are quite a few black players in the NHL right now, and black players made a significant impact on the game even before "right now." As far as I know, no one has ever compiled an all-time black roster, so here I am to do the job, in all my white-assed glory!

Fyi, for the purposes of this post I am going to treat black and biracial as one and the same. I have neither the time nor worldview to put any stock into notions of "racial purity" or "one drop" rules, regardless of which race I'm talking about. In any event, here goes:


Center  -  Nathan LaFayette

A third-round pick in 1991, LaFayette went on to play NHL hockey for six seasons, most notably for the Vancouver Canucks and LA Kings, in a career cut short by injury. His star shone brightest in the 1994 playoffs when he topped the league with a plus/minus of +13, tallying 9 post-season points to help guide Vancouver all the way to the Stanley Cup Finals. Unfortunately for him and Canucks fans, they lost Game Seven to the Mark Messier-led New York Rangers.

Right Wing  -  Jarome Iginla

Born in Canada to a Nigerian father and American mother, Jarome Iginla made his NHL debut in 1996 and remains in the league to this day, still playing well and drawing attention from opposing defenses.

A powerful skater with a blistering shot and nose for getting to the puck, he is one of only 19 players in the NHL's long history to score more than 600 goals. His to-date tally of 612 puts him ahead of such luminaries as Bobby Hull, Rocket Richard, Mike Bossy, and Guy LaFleur... The 1,095 points he rang up during his time in Calgary (525 goals + 570 assists) make him the top points producer in Flames history, by a whopping margin of 265 more than second place Theo Fleury... Plus he shows no signs of stopping, seeing as how he's shooting above 14% (better than his career average) so far this season.


Left Wing  -  Tony McKegney
McKegney's NHL career spanned from 1978 to 1991, during which he was known for Steady Eddie dependability in an era remembered more for outrageous personalities and gaudy stats. McKegney had nine seasons of 20+ goals, including three of 30+. His best season was 1987-88, when he bagged 40 goals and dished out 38 assists; the resulting 78 points stood for 14 years as the highest-scoring season by a black player, until Iginla broke it by racking up 96 (52 + 44) in 2001-2002. Everyone who has ever coached sports would give his right arm to have someone like McKegney on his roster.


Defense  -  Johnny Oduya
When you think about places to look for black athletes, you don't think of Stockholm, Sweden, but Johnny Oduya is living proof that you shouldn't assume they aren't there (and come to think of it, if you don't mind me sliding back to my 1980's sexual fantasies, the steamy Neneh Cherry is from Stockholm too!).

A solid two-way defenseman, Oduya is currently in his tenth NHL season and anchoring the Dallas blue line, but is best known for his stellar stint in Chicago that saw him play a key role in winning two Stanley Cup championships. In 2013, it was he who notched the assist on the Cup-winning goal against Boston with 59 seconds remaining in Game Six.

Side note:  Oduya's older brother Fredrik was drafted by the San Jose Sharks in 1993. Although Fredrik never cracked an NHL roster, he played professionally for eight years in the AHL, Sweden, and UK before dying in a motorcycle accident in this interestingly named town.


Defense  -  P.K. Subban
It seems a little strange to include a player on this roster who is only 27 and has yet to reach his peak, but then again, we're talking about P.K.! He has arguably the biggest and most charismatic personality of anybody in the NHL, which makes some people love him and some people hate him -- but most importantly, his game matches his personality.

A Norris Trophy winner (defenseman of  the year) and two-time All-Star, Subban patrols the blue line with authority and has a rocket of a shot that causes some people to accuse him of neglecting his defensive duties -- which would be a problem if it was true, but I've watched him play a lot of hockey and my eyeballs tell me it's not true.

Montreal's fans are undoubtedly the most demanding on Earth and arguably the most knowledgeable on Earth, and most of them responded with outrage when Subban was traded to Nashville in the offseason. That should tell you all you need to know.


Goaltender  -  Grant Fuhr
He has five Stanley Cup rings (all of them earned as a starter, although injury sidelined him during the playoffs for one of the five) and Wayne Gretzky has repeatedly called him the greatest goalie to ever play the game. As is true of all greats, he was at his best in the playoffs, which resulted in him being known as the best clutch goalie of the 1980's.

In addition to his status as a five-time Stanley Cup winner, Fuhr backstopped Team Canada to a pair of Canada Cup titles over the Soviets; was a six-time All-Star; and won both the Vezina and Jennings trophies... and he was the first black player inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame.


That's the first line. I wanted to include my second line, but this post is already long so I'll save that for another time.

P.K., Publicity, and Panoply on the Ice

While the Donald Sterling saga was hogging the headlines, another race-related sports story percolated a week ago in the NHL playoffs. Montreal Canadiens' defenseman P.K. Subban, who is black, scored an overtime goal to defeat the Boston Bruins in Game One of their second round series, and it was widely reported that some Boston fans reacted by taking to Twitter and making racist comments.

Since the trustworthiness of American journalists ranks somewhere below that of used car salesmen and Third World dictators, my initial reaction was to raise my eyebrows over 1) the fact that all of the reports insisted the tweets were bigoted but didn't bother to tell us what they actually said, and 2) the fact that none of the reports specified how many tweets they were talking about.

But after going deep into the Internet's bowels and searching sources from north of the border, I was able to find cut-and-pastes of three actual tweets. And I can confirm that they were, in fact, bigoted. This was not one of those cases in which The PC Police look at a chipmunk and see it as a wolverine.

Although the offending words were redacted like military secrets on Cold War government docs, the redaction was fuzzy at the edges and it left the first letters exposed -- and thus I can tell you, with one hundred percent certainty, that one of the tweets referred to Subban as a "monkey" and another referred to him as a "stupid monkey," while the third went whole hog by using the old-school slur "porch monkey."

Part of me wonders if the people who typed those tweets are not Bruins fans at all, but fans of other teams who posed as Bostonians in order to make the Bruins and their partisans look bad.

The other part of me knows that sounds paranoid. Especially since I am no Bruins fan myself, having never been to Massachusetts and having once written that "Claude Julien looks like a Soviet commissar."

I guess as a hockey fan, I have a knee-jerk tendency to get defensive about stories like this one. The tendency is borne from having heard people who have no idea what they are talking about -- people who have never watched a hockey game, much less attended one -- accuse the game of having a racist overtone and its fans of liking it because it has fewer black players than the other "big four" sports.

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Hockey was not invented in the United States, which has always had a sizable minority population, but in Canada, which has not -- and for the first 70 or so years of the the NHL's existence, practically every one of its players was a Canadian. In other words, for many decades it was inevitable that there would be very few black players, if any.

Yes, more and more non-Canadians have made it to the NHL over the past few generations, but those players have come from many nations, not just the U.S. They have come In large numbers from Sweden, Finland, Russia, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic; and in smaller numbers from Latvia, Germany, Ukraine, Switzerland, Norway, and Slovenia. Needless to say, you won't have much luck finding black people in any of those places.

When it comes to U.S.-born talent, there is no getting around the combined fact that southern states 1) have a higher-percentage black population than northern ones, and 2) had literally no youth hockey leagues until the 1990's.

There is also no getting around the fact that hockey spent generations not being evenly ingrained into the culture of our northern states. For years it seemed like 90% of American hockey players hailed from the two states of Minnesota and Massachusetts -- neither of which is known for melanin.

So demographics alone have made it almost inevitable for the NHL to have less black "representation" than the NBA, NFL, and MLB.

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There is also an economic argument that goes basically like this: Equipment for hockey is more numerous and more expensive than it is for the other sports, and because kids are growing and the equipment needs to be replaced periodically, the larger expense gets compounded and magnified over time...plus, the ability to pay for ice time adds to the cost; and since few ice rinks are found in minority neighborhoods, the cost of gas goes up too...etc., etc....and top-tier black athletes tend to come from especially impoverished backgrounds...so the ability of those athletes to gravitate towards hockey is crippled from the start.

Part of me wants to discount the economic argument, because my eyeballs and personal relationships tell me that most black people do not grow up in ghettos and slums these days. However, the argument is logical and it is backed by evidence, such as the fact that America's most prominent black hockey players tend to come from families in which money is not an overwhelming issue.

After all, Mike Grier tops the list of black American hockey players, and his uncle is none other than football Hall of Famer Rosey Grier...Seth Jones, the fourth player taken in last year's NHL draft, is the son of retired NBA player (and current NBA assistant coach) Popeye Jones...J.T. Brown plays for my Tampa Bay Lightning and I can't help but notice that his father, Ted Brown, played eight years for the Minnesota Vikings. (There's the word Minnesota again. I wonder what Brown's sporting aspirations would have been if his father had spent his career playing for the Saints or Chiefs?)

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Still, in spite of all these built-in hurdles, black players have been significant in NHL history -- much more so than the non-hockey-fan public realizes.

You cannot win a Stanley Cup without a money goaltender, even if your point-scorers are guys named Wayne Gretzky and Mark Messier, and it just so happens that Grant Fuhr -- the Hall of Famer who goaltended the Edmonton Oilers dynasty to five Cups between 1984 and 1990 -- is biracial. Fuhr actually has more rings than Gretzky because "The Great One" got traded in 1988, and Gretzky has repeatedly referred to him as "the greatest goaltender in NHL history."

During the same decade Fuhr was making a name for himself by keeping pucks out of the net, Tony McKegney became known for asserting himself in the slot and knocking pucks into the net. He had seven 20-goal seasons during the 1980's, including a 40-goal, 38-assist campaign for the St. Louis Blues in the 1987-'88 season.

More recently, Jarome Iginla has twice led the NHL in goals; been awarded the Lester B. Pearson Award as the league's most outstanding player; and twice been awarded the ESPY for the league's best player. In 2009 he won the Mark Messier Award that recognizes "an individual as a superior leader within their sport, and as a contributing member of society."

Three years ago, Joel Ward's stellar postseason propelled the Nashville Predators beyond the first round of the playoffs for the first time in franchise history. A year later, after that success earned him a lucrative free agent contract with the Washington Capitals, he famously ousted the Philadelphia Flyers from the playoffs with his series-winning overtime goal in Game Seven of the opening round.

And of course there is P.K. Subban himself. Last season he won the Norris Trophy as the NHL defensive player of the year. This year, nobody has played better in the playoffs than him; and if the playoffs ended tonight he would probably hoist the Conn Smythe Trophy as the postseason's most valuable player.

If anyone is looking for a "golden era" of black hockey, we may well be entering it. Iginla is still playing; this season saw Ward notch his first career hat trick; Subban probably has yet to hit his prime, since he just turned 25 yesterday; and out west, 21-year-old Devante Smith-Pelly has scored three goals in the last two games to stake his Anaheim Ducks to a 3-2 series lead over their cross-town rival, the LA Kings.

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Of course, when people allege that there is bigotry in hockey, they usually aim the allegation more at fans than at players, and therefore it is important to point out that there was no turmoil to speak of when Willie O'Ree broke the color barrier in 1958.

If only Jackie Robinson had been treated that well when he signed with the Dodgers 11 years earlier...

And more to the point, if only Doug Williams had been treated that well when he became a "quarterblack" 20 years later...

When it comes to Bruins fans in particular, it is hard to imagine them stewing in anti-black sentiment for a number of reasons. One of those reasons, interestingly enough, is the fact that the Bruins were the team that broke the color barrier by signing O'Ree.

Another reason is the fact that Anson Carter was one of the Bruins' most popular players during his stint with the team.

And finally, there is this: Iginla plays for the Bruins at this very moment, and P.K. Subban's younger brother, Malcolm, is under contract with them at this very moment (though he currently plays in the minors).

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I cannot stand it when people criticize hockey for lacking diversity -- partly because those people are wrong, and partly because everyone assumes those people are right simply because they've been conditioned to think that way.

Hockey is as diverse a sport as you will find. Look on the ice at any NHL game and you will find people from many nations working together to achieve a common goal. They do this even though many of their homelands are bitter rivals in the political arena. They do this seamlessly even though they speak a half-dozen  native tongues between them.

In my adolescence, Russians were Soviets and were looked upon with suspicion. Today, Russian president Vladimir Putin is sowing discord in Eastern Europe and intends to keep smaller nations under his thumb. Yet I look at Russian hockey players as fellow human beings, as people  my kids should emulate; I do not look at them as invaders on my continent, or as willful pawns on the chessboards of tyrants.

This is the essence of diversity and it is diversity in its highest form, with its focus on the individual instead of the group. It comports not just with what I believe as a sports fan, but with what I believe as a human.

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I have problems with the contemporary notion of diversity, most of which you can figure out from the three paragraphs immediately above. I do not like it when perfectly fine words are hijacked and used as shibboleths, when they are used to advance an agenda while suppressing thought. I feel that this has been done to the word "diversity," and therefore I have mixed emotions about the way the NHL handles race.

The NHL seldom acknowledges differences in skin tone, and I think this is good. The league does not trip over itself to point out that the man who just got the hat trick is black -- just like it does not trip over itself to point out that the other guy with a hat trick is from Stockholm. If Joel Ward scores the winner, the league simply says that Joel Ward scored the winner, no different than it would if Sidney Crosby scored it.

This avoids the ridiculous-looking spectacle that ensues when a bunch of 40- and 50-something white guys act like they are so excited about Joel Ward being black that they won't be able to sleep tonight. I don't doubt that they are happy to see black players do good, but come on...

On the other side of the coin, however, I am often disappointed with this same approach. I look at the abundance of black talent in the league, and at black players who are playing the world's greatest spectator sport at its highest level, and it boggles my mind that the NHL is not hyping their success. This seems to create a situation in which the league impairs its chances for future growth by not getting its "you are one of us" message out to minority youth.

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I'm not sure how to wind this post up and not sure I even have a main point.

It started with me wanting to defend the game I love from what I thought was an unfair attack. And I sought to do that by saying things that few people have bothered to report in the "Subban slurs" coverage. Then it morphed into a stroll through black hockey history. Then it morphed into an indecisive analysis of the NHL's racial marketing (non)strategy(ies).

So I guess I will wrap it up without saying anything more, other than to repeat my obvious mantra that the game of hockey is a game for everyone -- and to repeat my oft-uttered plea that you start watching it if you haven't already.

There was a Game Seven last night and there are two elimination games tonight. One of them will even include P.K. Subban. If you have any preconceived notions, just be sure to leave them at the door...