Earlier this week, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and the National Hockey League got into a back and forth over an event to be hosted in the state, focused on pushing diversity efforts within the league.
In a post about the event on Linkedin, the NHL shared that its job conference, being held in Fort Lauderdale, the Pathway to Hockey Summit, on Feb. 2, 2023, would be exclusive to female, Black, Asian, Pacific Islander, Hispanic/Latino, LGBTQ, disabled individuals, and veterans.
While the NHL’s purpose for the event was to grow the diversity of its league and workforce, DeSantis criticized the move, with his press secretary Bryan Griffin saying it was “discrimination.”
“Discrimination of any sort is not welcome in the state of Florida, and we do not abide by the woke notion that discrimination should be overlooked if applied in a politically popular manner or against a politically unpopular demographic,” Griffin shared in a statement.
Griffin continued in his statement, saying that DeSantis’ administration would be “fighting all discrimination in our schools and our workplaces, and we will fight it in publicly accessible places of meeting or activity.”
The statement ended by calling out the NHL to remove and denounce the “discriminatory prohibitions” for the summit.
The NHL has since backtracked from its initial description of the event, now saying that anyone who is over the age of 18 is able to attend the job fair, Fox News reported.
The NHL has long been criticized for its lack of inclusion and diversity within the league. A first of its kind report from the NHL, conducted in 2022, found that 83.6% of their employees were white and 62% were men.
“The whole purpose behind doing a workforce study is to provide a baseline: a fact-based baseline so that you can begin to develop very intentional and specific strategies around where you need to hire, how you need to hire, how you need to improve your brand,” Kim Davis, the NHL's executive vice president of social impact, growth and legislative affairs told The Associated Press at the time of the report’s release. “This is a good start, but there’s a ways to go.”
The NHL has boomed in Florida over the past decade, with the Tampa Bay Lightning winning two of the last three Stanley Cup Finals and appearing in four of the last eight. The state’s other team, the Florida Panthers, have also seen regular season success in recent years, finishing first in their division last season.
Florida is also set to host this year’s NHL All Star Weekend on Feb. 3 and 4 from the FLA Live Arena in Sunrise, Florida.
Some have called for the league to remove the event from Florida, which wouldn’t be the first time one of the four major sports leagues moved such an event over state politics. The last was the NBA’s decision to move the 2016 NBA All Star Game from Charlotte, North Carolina, after the state passed a “transgender bathroom law.”
Still, NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman has not indicated that the event would be moved from Florida.
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