I always think of this article that I found eye-opening and educational.
Even as someone in the top percentile of hockey watching, I honestly never thought about why I seldom saw black centremen until reading this, even as someone fully familiar with the black QB situation. The paragraphs and table below on players in trades was startling.
Racial Bias in Drafting and Development: The NHL’s Black Quarterback Problem
At the professional level, hockey players are often expected to sacrifice their individualism for the sake of the team, and refrain from straying too far out of the pre-conceived norms of hockey culture. Those that do can be subject to ridicule and rebuke from both the team and the media. A player of color, particularly a visible minority who does not actively attempt to transform their persona into a more hockey culture appropriate one, may face adverse consequences as a result. Players such as Anthony Duclair, Josh Ho-Sang, and P.K. Subban serve as somber reminders of players who clashed with management for transgressions that seem relatively minor from the outside looking in before being moved or demoted. However, even top performers without any noted character concerns such as Wayne Simmonds and Seth Jones were traded by their drafting team.
To quantify the frequency of this occurrence, we looked at every player’s under 25 seasons since 2008 (using data from evolving-hockey.com), and identified whether or not they ended up playing for multiple NHL teams in that time frame. Breaking these numbers out by their ethnic categories, shows a stark difference in outcomes for Black players over any other group. Nearly half of the Black players in the data set (49%) ended up moving on from their original team by age 25, a rate nearly double that of White players.
Once again, it is hard to reconcile the stark difference in outcomes between the groups when the difference in on ice impacts are minimal at best (the average WAR of the moved players was roughly the same across all groups).
