#im cranky so this is rambly and unsourced

[selkienicke]

I’m expanding on my point from twitter earlier about how genuinely the reasons for not allowing women into the NHL boil down to ‘sexism, specifically fear that the women will perform better than current NHL average and possibly better than top players in the NHL’

1 nhlers and former players themselves acknowledge that the old style heavy-fighting minimum protection nhl was not so much a skill game and that the parts of that that influence the game now don't require as much skill as passing/skating/scoring

2 relatedly when the nhl started there was way more space for players than there was talent and talent developed slowly over time w consistent practice. but like, if you watch some old NHL games? it’s like, yikes.

3 currently there are many players in the nhl who don't check much or get checked very much + who are quite small (and in Many cases smaller than women's players). So even if you buy the like blah blah women are more fragile physically bullshit theres not a logical reason to ban them from competing on men's teams like there is in like, football or w/e (not that I’m agreeing with that premise OR that size correlates particularly strongly with fighting skill in the current nhl, just saying it doesn't apply here)

4 this ties into my enormous issue w the nhl as an institution and the way they STILL overvalue violence as central to the sport even though

5 like it's not. Like, the KHL is huge and very popular and playstyle isnt actually that different from the NHL (but still closer to womens league rules); I think this applies to the SHL as well but I don’t really know enough about that league to say this definitively

6 there is ALREADY a governing body (the lIHF: international ice hockey federation) and rule set in place. it’s not like rules would need to be written from scratch

7 in order to make the rules of the nhl mesh with like the nwhl rules for example the main changes would need to be ones that increase player safety and like the only 'drawback' would be that they have to...play safer....not hit as hard, avoid certain types of checks, etc. (For example in the women's league everyone is required to wear a full cage mask which is REALLY JUST SENSIBLE, you arent allowed to fight (like Actually not like nhl you arent allowed to fight), the ice is bigger in some cases (which again, requires more skill imo, but anyway the NWHL uses NHL standard ice instead of Olympic standard ice which is larger), and it's not as contact heavy

Which means players can play for much longer bc their brains arent being fucking scrambled by constant and completely unnecessary head hits. There was a player on the Finnish national team who is in her 40s, and a lot of nhl players play overseas after they retire, in like the KHL especially

8 it's been demonstrated thru like the all star games that the best women generally perform as well as or better than the best men when given the same tasks. Tasks which are specifically supposed to measure like....eliteness

So it's literally just adherence to tradition wrt fighting and sexism

That's like...it

Like for real the women at the ASG this year were all top 1-2 in the events they played in as like A Fun Demonstration (this was a whole thing bc the players get 10k for winning the event but they didnt want to give it to the woman who won and i think eventually they just gave both her and the dude who came second the prize money. Which was extra fucking garbage bc FTR the nhl contributes 50k TOTAL to the NWHL (it might go up to 100k total now that the CWHL folded but like....the MINIMUM player salary in the nhl is 750k and most of the women in North American hockey make less than 10k YEARLY

It’s just incredibly fucking transparent that lip service to ‘growing the game’ is ‘as long as you remain constrained by limits that make it difficult for you to reach parity and then when you do it any way we refuse direct comparison so you don’t make us look bad.’