Minnesota Wild are latest NHL team to cave to homophobia, abandon Pride jerseys

The Minnesota Wild chose to abandon its plan for players to wear LGBT-Pride-inspired warm-up jerseys for their NHL game tonight against the Calgary Flames. The team had previously announced they would be worn.

The snub to the LGBT community was first noticed by The Athletic writer Michael Russo, who covers the NHL and the Wild specifically.

The Wild did change their Twitter avatar to a rainbow-colored logo, and Russo said various players did use Pride Tape on their warm-up sticks.

The latter had been announced previously by the club on the event website. Interestingly, Google says that website was updated just before the start of the match. It’s unknown whether that site had previously mentioned the jerseys being worn.

Regardless, the team had Pride jerseys all ready to be auctioned off (for charity, we presume). That website has been quietly removed.

It’s just the latest disappointment to come out of the the NHL, which for years has seemingly helped lead a charge toward LGBT inclusion in sports. Now the Wild join the New York Rangers and Philadelphia Flyers player Ivan Provorov as having abandoned a Pride-jersey warm-up initiative.

It’s also not the first time the Wild have upset LGBT fans. In 2018, the club’s “Hockey Is For Everyone” event didn’t acknowledge the LGBT community alongside other outreach groups.

To keep things in context, the Wild have made outreach efforts. You can see some of the things the club did do in and around the event on the website.

Yet the announcement of Pride jerseys — only to abandon the plan — is another slap in the face of a community that is currently going through some things.

Hopefully the Wild do what the Flyers did, tell the public who the problem was, and let him answer questions from the media. The way this is being handled by the Wild so far — quietly, deleting web pages with no announcement — is shady at best.