There are circumstances in sports in which you find yourself doing something you said you would never do. Maybe you’re a Red Sox fan rooting for the Yankees to beat the Rays. Or maybe you’re me, defending Sean Avery.

A couple of nights ago Philadelphia Flyer Wayne Simmonds got into a heated exchange with Avery on the ice and called him - ok, allegedly called him - a fucking faggot. 

A lot has been made of this already. Unfortunately, a lot of what’s been made about it is people saying “Let it go” or “It’s just part of the game” or a hundred variations of what ends up to be boys will be boys. And too many people are yelling about Avery being a whiner about it or not being able to take an insult. They want him to let it go. But it shouldn’t be let go. It shouldn’t be swept under the rug or taken as just a part of the game. It’s not just an insult. Simmonds didn’t call Avery a fucking asshole, which would have been fine and mostly true. He called him a slur that is derogatory and demeaning to an entire group of people. That he used the term toward Avery - who is an outspoken gay rights advocate and made a video supporting marriage equality - may lead one to believe that Simmonds’s choice of words were carefully picked.

Earlier this year, the NBA fined Kobe Bryant $100,000 for calling a referee the same thing. 

[Commissioner David] Stern strongly condemned Bryant’s use of the slur in a statement.

“While I’m fully aware that basketball is an emotional game, such a distasteful term should never be tolerated,” he said. “Accordingly, I have fined Kobe $100,000. Kobe and everyone associated with the NBA know that insensitive or derogatory comments are not acceptable and have no place in our game or society.”

The NHL, however, has decided to not do anything about the slur directed at Avery because they claim to not have any real proof of what was said. Regardless, this would be an opportune moment for them to address the issue of insensitivity and intolerance. Given that Simmonds himself was the subject of a racial insult just last week - an incident the NHL predictably mishandled - this would be the perfect time for Gary Bettman to make a blanket statement about acceptable behavior from  both players and fans attending games. I’m not asking for the league to come out with some kind of insults guideline, but to let this sit makes it look like they don’t care.

Considering there has been a media spotlight in the past year on the bullying of gay people in light of how many young gay people are committing suicide or at least contemplating it because they feel like society does not accept them or value them as human beings, Bettman has the perfect opportunity here to show that the NHL is on the right side of the line when it comes to, well, behaving like civilized human beings. At the very least, they should condemn the use of derogatory language that demeans an entire class of citizens. At the most, they could fine Simmonds and donate the money to the It Gets Better project. 

Don’t let a “boys will be boys” attitude prevail because that is one of the reasons a project like It Gets Better needs to be around in the first place. That the NHL is a public entity with public figures who are heroes to many kids is all the more reason for the league to address the issue and turn it into a way to send a positive message about tolerance. 

[image: Bruce Bennet/Getty]

It’s a Sunday in late September. That means there are football games to be watched today. A 1:00 game. A 4:00 game. There is pre-season hockey on tv tonight and while, yea, it’s pre-season, it’s still hockey. The sounds of sticks and skates and whistles in my living room is music to my ears. There’s the final countdown of the baseball season, my Yankees playing the Red Sox, playoff time close at hand. There’s no basketball, but the lockout is part of the day’s course of sports news. And of course, there’s soccer. I’m pretty sure soccer season never ends.

It’s almost overwhelming, this embarrassment of sports riches. I leave Sportscenter on all morning so I can take in everything that’s happening in each sport as I go about my routine. I’m making fun of the Mets to my father in email, fighting with my son about hockey (he’s a damn Rangers fan) and talking Green Bay footbal with my best friend. My twitter timeline reads like a sports ticker and I can barely keep up with all the cheers and boos, shit-talking and score changes. 

It’s almost too much at times, but I won’t tune any of it out because it doesn’t last that long, this convergence of seasons. Soon, baseball will be over, regular season hockey will take precedence for me over football games and the frenzied feeling of having all the sports handed to me at once will abate as I settle into a mood of careful hope with the Islanders and expected disappointment from the Jets. 

Sports may not be life, but early falls sure brings one hell of a distraction from it.

14-year-old Lexi Peters wanted to play as a girl character in the EA Sports NHL games. But no female characters customizations were available. 

“I asked my dad, ‘Why aren’t there girls in the NHL video game?’ And he said, ‘I don’t know, write a letter.’ So, I did,” Lexi told the Globe and Mail from her home in Buffalo, N.Y.

She sent a typewritten letter to the executives of one the largest video game makers in the world, asking them to add women players.

She wrote: “It is unfair to women and girl hockey players around the world, many of them who play and enjoy your game. I have created a character of myself, except I have to be represented by a male and that’s not fun.”

The president of EA Sports forwarded the letter to the producer of the games, David Littman, who then got permission from the NHL to build a female character into the game.

Then EA Sports gave Lexi the news. Not only were they adding a female character option, but they wanted Lexi to play the part of the “default” female player that gamers would then be able to customize.

“I was so excited,” says Lexi. “My dad called my grandpa immediately, who called my Uncle Chris, like a chain reaction.”

Lexi Peters has played ice hockey for four years. 

“It’s a big change and it’s exciting to see, because so many girls pay hockey now,” said Manon Rhéaume, the only woman to ever play in the real-world NHL.

I’ll pick up NHL 12 tomorrow on my way home from work and later in the evening settle down for my annual ass-kicking at the hands of my son (I usually play the game once before I surrender it to him - I haven’t been good at a hockey video game since NHL ‘94). But at least this time I get to play as a girl. 

Way to go, Lexi.

The NHL’s off-season continues to be one of grim news. 

A plane carrying a hockey team with international players, including some NHL veterans, crashed as it took off Wednesday afternoon from Russia’s Yaroslavl airport, killing at least 43 people, Russian emergency officials said.

The Yak-42 aircraft was taking players for Lokomotiv Yaroslavl — one of Russia’s leading ice hockey teams — to Minsk, the Belarusian capital, the Russian aviation authority told CNN.

Two of the 45 people aboard the plane, which included eight crew members, survived, a Russian Emergency Situations Ministry representative said. Eleven of those on the aircraft were foreigners, the ministry said.

Yaroslavl’s regional governor, Sergei Vakhrukov, named the two survivors as Russian forward Alexander Galimov and flight crew member Alexander Sizov. Both are being treated in intensive care.

Among the dead are the team’s coach Brad McCrimmon who played 18 seasons in the NHL and several years as assistant coach with the Islanders, Flames, Thrashers and Red Wings before taking the job as the coach for Lokomitiv Yaroslavl. At least five other former NHLers were on board the plane.

The KHL is one of the top professional leagues in the world. The league’s season was to open tomorrow.

The above tweet is from Hockey News writer Adam Proteau. Pretty much say it all. It’s been a cruel summer for hockey.

I had a rather heated conversation on twitter a few days ago with someone who was upset that the New York Islanders now have an Official Tattoo Parlor. That’s right, a tattoo parlor - Tattoo Lou’s - is now a sponsor of an NHL team and they will set up a booth right inside the Nassau Coliseum.

The guy I had this conversation with (I don’t know him personally) was livid about the whole tattoo thing. He’s no longer taking his young daughters to Islander games. Because with the addition of a tattoo sponsor, he says Isles games are no longer family friendly.

The gist of my questions to him went like this: So, the beer ads, the bar sponsorships, the Ice Girls shaking their asses, the t-shirt throwing young women with their in-your-face cleavage and the fighting on the ice and in the stands were all fine family friendly entertainment until they had the nerve to add a tattoo shop to the lobby?

Apparently, yes. All of the other stuff was fine, but it’s the tattoos that are going to send the wrong message to his daughters. So he’s boycotting the Islander games this year. And I’m sure he’s writing a strongly worded letter to the team to let him know they have lost a valued customer because of their silly insistence on doing something new to get the average consumer of Islanders hockey - that being a male in his late 20s and not ten year old girls - to spend more money at the Coliseum. I’m sure they will take his complaint to heart. 

Sports arenas and stadiums have come a long way from the days when you’d get to the game, buy a hot dog, watch the game and leave. They are entertainment complexes now. The food courts alone are destinations where you could spend an entire day sampling foods from sushi to pulled pork to deep fried anything. There are picnic areas, interactive entertainment, a hundred things to do besides watch the game. 

Is having a tattoo booth in the lobby of an arena any different or worse than having a full service bar in the lobby? Can you fault the team for trying to do something new or innovative to draw the fans in? Sure, they’re not drawing them into the game itself but once you’ve paid for their ticket management is less concerned about you actually watching the event than spending money at their concessions. For all they care, you could watch one inning of a baseball game and spend the others forking over cash to eat tacos, have your picture taken with a mascot, buying souvenirs or go on rides. The game is almost incidental to your stadium experience in the eyes of marketing executives.

That’s not say I think addition of a tattoo booth to the Nassau Coliseum is the greatest idea in the world. I have nothing against tattoos - my daughter and boyfriend combined have more ink than the Sunday New York Times - but I do have something about the Islanders suddenly coming up with ideas to add more fun and excitement to game nights when they’re just going to be leaving us in a couple of years. It’s like your girlfriend getting a boob job right before she dumps you. 

Ok, maybe a bad boob job. Because the Islander flash you can choose from is pretty damn hokey. I’m surprised you can’t choose a piece that has the words to Billy Joel’s “Downeaster Alexa” scrawled over the old fishsticks logo. 

Maybe the guy I was talking to on twitter is right. Maybe the tattoo thing is a bad idea. Lord knows there are enough young people walking around Long Island with regrettable tattoos. It’s sad to imagine a future Long Island where hundreds of hockey fans are walking around with flaming puck tattoos honoring a team that doesn’t even exist anymore. Tattoos are permanent. Sports teams are not.

I’m going to skip past the tattoo booth opening night as I make my way to the sushi bar between periods. Not because I don’t like it. I’m just holding out on the tattoo thing until they open a booth at Yankee Stadium. Because I know they’ll never leave me.

The death of former NHLer Wade Belak might have gone widely unnoticed by most news outlets if not for that the fact that Belak was the third hockey player - all of them considered enforcers - to die during this off season.

Belak, who played for five teams in his NHL career, was found dead last Wednesday. His death was ruled a suicide.

On August 15, Vancouver Canuck Rick Rypien, who had been battling depression for more than ten years, committed suicide.

On May 13 Derek Bogard, who played for the Minnesota Wild and New York Rangers, was found dead due to a lethal combination of alcohol and oxycodone. 

Boogard’s last NHL game was in December 2010. He suffered a concussion during a fight in that game and never recovered enough to play again.

Rypien suffered a series of injuries in his career, missing so many games at one point that his frustration led him to take a leave of absence from the Canucks in 2009. In 2010 he took another leave of absence, citing personal reasons. 

The sudden deaths of three NHL veterans has made the NHL take a hard look their existing mental health programs and has made many people question if the league provides enough assistance to its players, especially those who have suffered repeated head injuries over the course of their career. That these three men were all fighters is not something that should be regarded as coincidence.

League Commissioner Gary Bettman and NHLPA director Donald Fehr issued this joint statement after the death of Balek:

“While the circumstances of each case are unique, these tragic events cannot be ignored. We are committed to examining, in detail, the factors that may have contributed to these events, and to determining whether concrete steps can be taken to enhance player welfare and minimize the likelihood of such events taking place. Our organizations are committed to a thorough evaluation of our existing assistance programs and practices and will make immediate modifications and improvements to the extent they are deemed warranted.”

Here’s hoping the league makes every effort to connect the dots between the deaths of Belak, Boogard and Rypien. Injuries, concussions and career frustration are all things that can lead to deterioration of mental health, especially when someone is already suffering from depression. The NHL needs to take a closer look at not only how the injuries inherent in playing a contact sport impacts a player’s health, but how not playing the game impacts a player’s mental health.

RIP Belak, Boogard and Rypien. 

[image: Getty Images]

Asking me to explain why hockey is a real sport is a good way to get hazed when you consider my stellar credentials.

I’m originally from California, which is currently home to three teams:

The Los Angeles Kings, who haven’t managed to win a Cup for the 43 seasons of their existence, including 8 years when they had the best player in the history of the game scoring an average of 114.75 points per season for them.

The Anaheim Ducks, who will forever be known as the Mighty Ducks, who, yes, were originally owned by the Walt Disney Corporation. Who are, yes, named after that ice hockey-based Bad News Bears Disney movie. And, finally, yes, Emilio Estevez was in that movie, and yes, he played a hockey coach who clearly didn’t know how to skate. The Ducks have managed to win a Cup, and are no longer owned by Disney, but remain a hockey team named after cartoonish waterfowl.

The San Jose Sharks, whohave statistically been playing “good” hockey, placing 1st or 2nd in the Pacific Division every year since 2004, but until this last year have brilliantly and consistently choked during the playoffs against teams they’ve habitually beaten during the regular season as if they suddenly and inconveniently remember that they still hold the record for most losses in a single season.

Further eroding my hockey credibility is the fact that I am a product of the NHL’s 1990s expansion years, which brought hockey to the Sun Belt, stripped Canada of two franchises, and is the decade that brought us FoxTrax – technology designed to make hockey watchable on TV:

The arrival of FoxTrax coincided with a ratings slump that that NHL wouldn’t recover from until the NHL Winter Classic debuted in 2008. It sounds like the 90s were rough until you look at who was winning the Cup: Edmonton; Pittsburgh (twice); Montreal (their 24^th); my beloved New York Rangers (their 4th after 54 long years); and the New Jersey Devils’ dynasty began, followed by the transplanted Nordiques’ win in Colorado. The Red Wings (who suck) got it twice in row, and Dallas finished off the decade, establishing the Sun Belt as a legit home for the Stanley Cup.

It was a good decade for the sport, but mostly because it was the decade I understood why it was my sport.

Of the big four American sports leagues, the NHL has the smallest total fan base, the smallest revenue from television, and the least sponsorship. Big Three American sports fans like to look down at hockey fans because of these stats. They ask, “Is there even a medal for fourth place?”

Fact is, hockey sucks on television. The game moves fast and the center of the action, a small black puck, is easily lost visually as it zips around at speeds exceeding 80mph. This was the problem Fox was attempting to solve when they developed FoxTrax: they thought highlighting the puck would allow folks to keep up, but it just made it look like a video game. 

In hockey you watch the whole game, and you must go to the arena to actually see and appreciate the whole game. You can’t be a phone-it-in couch-based fan because you won’t appreciate a game where you can only see 1/3rd of the action at any given time. HD and big screens have helped the visibility situation a lot, but more than any other sport, you need to be at a game to understand and completely appreciate it.

Hockey requires constant and precise attention. It’s 60 minutes broken into three periods of singularly fluid motion. They don’t stop after each play to assess field position. They don’t pause after each pitch to pose for the camera. Hockey is a sport on the clock and that clock is relentless. Look away and you might miss the second that changes the course of the entire game.

All sports require commitment, but because full appreciation of hockey requires physical presence to grok it, I think hockey is better at drawing you in. The NHL estimates that fully half of its fan base roots for teams in outside markets. I’m guessing because folks continue to rabidly root for their home team once they’ve been transplanted from traditional hockey markets where it’s a) cold, and b) fucking cold.

If you let it in, hockey gets under your skin. It’s not a sport for the short attention span generation; it’s a commitment.  And that’s how I judge my sports: not by the size or shape of the ball, but by the quality and the commitment of the fan.

The New York Islanders all but left town last night. Their contract runs until 2015 and after that they will surely leave but in the hearts and minds of Islander fans, they’re already gone. We’re preparing for a funeral that is going to be four years in the making. 

The voters of Nassau County made it clear. Their partisan politics got in the way of facts and figures and reality and the majority of residents - at least those who bothered to come out and vote - gave the New York Islanders the finger while they cast those votes. They don’t want hockey here. They don’t want the Coliseum. They don’t want to better their community. There’s no other conclusion I can draw for this. 

This is a sports blog and I won’t bother you with the economic fallout of this vote. My anger is over here. My sadness, it’s right here. My sadness is for my hockey team. 

I cried before I went to sleep last night. I sat in front of my computer and watched the twitter stream of my fellow hockey fans as we all found out the results together and I cried. No matter what happens with the Coliseum, no matter what they decided to do with that land now, the Islanders are going to leave. 

They haven’t been such a great team lately. But they’re getting better. So much better. Watching them grow into a playoff team has been exciting. Watching the young players, knowing they are going to lead the team to future greatness, that’s such a tremendous part of being a sports fan. And they’re going to have to do it with this team. Because what player is going to sign with the Islanders now that their future is so up in the air? This is our team. This is the team that’s going to carry us for the next four years as we prepare to say goodbye. Now with each game, with each win, with each step toward regaining the power they once held over the NHL, there will be a pervasive sadness to go along with the cheers. Every fan who sits down to watch a game in the Nassau Coliseum will be thinking the same thought: This is all going to be gone.

Those banners hanging from the rafters? The four Stanley Cup banners, the conference banners and division banners, the banners with names like Bossy, Gillies, Nystrom and Smith? They will be hanging somewhere else. Maybe Quebec. Maybe Kansas City. Maybe even just next door in Brooklyn. Wherever those banners hang, even if that place is still in New York, it won’t look right. It won’t feel right. Those championships were born and raised on Long Island. Those Stanley Cups were fought for in the Nassau Coliseum. Those banners belong to us, the fans, as much as they belong to the team. To think of those blue and orange numbers hanging from the rafters in a Quebec arena is heartbreaking.

There’s a sticker on the back of my car that says “We’re all Islanders.” I wish everyone felt that way. I wish the people who went to the polls last night to vote no thought of us as a community rather than a bunch of disparate towns whose people are only brought together by identity politics. Maybe they don’t remember the parades down Hempstead Turnpike. Maybe they don’t remember the pride of being home to an NHL dynasty. Maybe they forgot that the centerpiece of the team’s uniform is a picture of Long Island. We’re all Islanders. Don’t we all want what’s best for our communities? Perhaps not.

So how do you root for a team that you know is going to leave you? Four lame duck seasons of hockey - seasons in which the team will only get better and better - is going to feel like a pretty long funeral march. It’s not even just the team. How do we say goodbye to hockey? What is fall and winter without the skates hitting the ice, without the red lights, the air horns, the sound of boards rattling, the cursing of lost power play opportunities, the high fives? I can’t imagine greeting October without the anticipation of seeing my favorite hockey team on the ice. The Coliseum - if it still stands - will certainly live up to its nickname of the The Mausoleum. The closer it gets to 2015 and the end of the Islanders lease, the more it will feel like a burial ground. Each game, each season will bring us closer to saying goodbye to part of our lives. To the game, to the team, to the banners that hang from the rafters.

In about two years, I’ll probably be moving from Long Island to Northern California (so, how are those Sharks looking?). I was going to say goodbye to the Islanders and the Coliseum anyway, but on my own terms. I’ll come back to visit them in 2015 for their farewell tour. I’ll wear my Islanders jersey and feel at home in the Coliseum because that place - no matter how crappy it may be on the inside - always feels like home. I’ll say my proper farewells and go back to California with “We’re all Islanders” tattooed on my heart. Because this team - the one that plays in Nassau County and not one that will play in any other place - will always be mine. 

[photo: Jim McIsaac, Getty Images]