NHL FanPulse: The duality of hockey culture

It’s safe to say that it hasn’t been the best few months for the NHL’s optics, and even that of ice hockey as a sport.

Starting with the events leading up to the firing of Don Cherry from CBC’s Hockey Night in Canada, the normative behaviors of hockey culture have been on trial, and already, guilty verdicts have been dealt to coaches and people in positions of leadership across all levels of the game. Fans, analysts, writers, the media, and players alike are starting to take a look at hockey culture under the microscope, and aren’t always finding the results to be satisfying:

Words like tough, gritty, and intense, while mainly descriptive of the sport itself, find themselves manifested in the very way hockey players are both treated and expected to act.