The starting field of the Stanley Cup playoffs has been halved to eight, but the remaining teams provide a window into the Woke bent of the NHL.
Here’s a rooters’ guide so climate crazies and socialists can align with the team best representing their lunacy, and the rest of us can hope that teams with non-Woke sponsorship prevail.
The greatest dichotomy is present in the series between the Seattle Kraken and Dallas Stars.
Seattle, host city in the past to ongoing rioting, CHAZ (Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone) and CHOP (Capital Hill Occupied Protest), predictably has some wacko sponsorship for its hockey team.
Said team, in only its second year of existence as an expansion franchise, leads its current best-of-7 series 2-1 and looks like a strong bet to move on in the chase for the Cup, thereby providing yet more evidence of the NHL’s penchant for being overly generous to new franchises.
Las Vegas, too, is a recent expansion operation that has experienced immense success due to the NHL being a combination Woke and Socialist organization. Think of expansion largesse visited on these newcomers as the NHL equivalent of forgiving student loans and subsidizing mortgages of poor credit risks at the expense of people with good credit ratings.
Existing NHL franchises such as Buffalo, which in 52 years of existence has exactly zero Stanley Cup championships, and hasn’t even made the playoffs since 2011 — losing in the first round then — might want to wonder why they even bother to flesh out the regular season field.
Seattle opponent, Dallas, is the social opposite of the Kraken. The Stars play in American Airlines Arena, celebrating a company that burns fossil fuel and emits carbon into the atmosphere in the interest of transporting passengers and freight to better the world.
How horrible. And Dallas is right smack in red state Texas. Just mentioning that causes leftists to whine of being traumatized.
Seattle, meanwhile, plays in Climate Pledge Arena, which sounds more like a lemon-scented spray-on climate polish than a sporting facility.
The Kraken helmet sponsor is Amazon, whose various sins are forgiven by the socialist crowd because it provides cheaper incense delivered to their doors. The Kraken jersey sponsor is the Muckleshoot Indian Tribe. That’s so Elizabeth “Pocahontas” Warren.
Meanwhile, the Dallas helmet sponsorship is a two-barrelled approach of Energy Transfer for home games (a nod perhaps to a better reception in an oil-friendly state) and 7-Eleven on the road.
The Toronto Maple Leafs are a curious contradiction of sponsorship. Canada’s serial playoff underperformers, despite spending the equivalent of the country’s GDP annually on salaries, finally made it past the first round this year, but are in a 3-0 hole to Florida in round two.
The Maple Leafs play in Scotiabank Arena. Nothing could be more fitting than a powerhouse financial institution as a sponsor for a freespending, underachieving hockey operation.
Maple Leaf jerseys bear a script Milk insignia, representing sponsorship by the Ontario Dairy Farmers. It was amusing to read the response on one fan site, in which the deal was headlined as “offensive, disgusting.”
Why? The milk business is a “terrible and controversial industry,” detrimental to animals, the environment and our health.
Ironically, Maple Leafs helmet sponsor TikTok was mentioned in the same screed, with nary a bad word about that.
This might seem curious considering TikTok is under a bit of bi-partisan fire for being a propagandizing and spying operation of the Chinese Communists. This doesn’t matter to the Woke types. They just want to post and/or view insipid videos.
Of the remaining eight teams, I find myself obliged to align with the New Jersey Devils and Edmonton Oilers for sponsorship reasons.
First, the Devils play in the Prudential Center. What is more American than a life insurance/financial services giant? That arena is nicknamed “The Rock,” an homage to Prudential advertising. And the Devils’ helmet sponsor is Prudential.
Edmonton plays in Rogers Place, sponsored by the Canadian communications megalith. The traditionalist Oilers will not besmirch their jerseys with corporate sponsorship, and keep their home helmets similarly sanitary.
On the road, those Oilers helmets have sponsorship from SkipTheDishes, a Canadian online food delivery service.
I once had Prudential life insurance, but, alas, switched to Northwestern Mutual for a better deal. If only I lived in Canada, I’d support SkipTheDishes with an order or two.
Meanwhile, let’s go Devils and Oilers.
Sam Ross Jr's site 