Dion Phaneuf wouldn't mind. Andrew Ladd apparently doesn't care. But how would a gay NHL player really be received by a professional hockey world that doesn't often make space for the individual over the team? To hear You Can Play co-founder Patrick Burke tell it, it may not go over all that well, which would explain why, even now, two-plus years after You Can Play joined the NHL as an official partner, we haven't yet seen an NHL player come out.
"Hockey is all about the team. Hockey culture hates individualism," said Burke, via ESPN's Pierre LeBrun. "Whether that's right or wrong, hockey culture is that you do not stand out. You do not make yourself different from the team. We've had players in our league that have been yelled at for high-fiving too aggressively. So I do wonder from talking to a bunch of different players in the league that this is a team sport and almost an obsessively team culture and I think there are guys out there that are nervous about the idea that them coming out would somehow be going against that."
Burke may have something of a point. The game of hockey is, seemingly moreso than any of the other major sports, built on the notion of chemistry, both in the locker room and on the ice. Teams are often greater than the sum of the parts and players who offer little on the ice frequenlty remain gainfully employed just because of the personality and leadership they bring in the dressing room. Sportnet's Elliotte Friedman actually devoted a portion of a recent "30 Thoughts" column to the odd case of Justin Johnson, a player for the Toronto Marlies, the Toronto Maple Leafs AHL affiliate, and his contract - a contract that pays him bonuses based on the production of other Marlies players.
Burke, whose brother Brendan remains the only openly gay man associated with a hockey program - Brendan was a student manager of the men's hockey team at Miami University when he came out in 2009 - and helped co-found You Can Play with the mission of "ensuring equality, respect and safety for all athletes, without regard to sexual orientation," says that others in and around the NHL have expressed interest in following in Brendan's footsteps.
"Look, we denied it for several years because we didn't want players to feel pressure, we didn't want to kick off a witch hunt, we didn't want people trying to guess who was who," said Burke. "But yes, our organization has spoken with gay players in the National Hockey League, gay staff members, gay media members."
In the end, with players like the NBA's Jason Collins and the NFL's Michael Sam having come out already, what Burke really feels is surprise that no NHL player has yet felt they can open up themselves to their team and to the world.
"It's surprising," Burke told LeBrun. "We felt that the work the league was doing, the culture that the league had, the way our guys responded not just to our initiative, but to the LGBT community in general, I think we thought for sure by now there would be an out player in the NHL."
But he also knows it's just a matter of time.
"All we can continue to do is make efforts to let them know that the hockey community wants everyone to be themselves and live their lives authentically and be true to who you are," said Burke. "And if you're a NHL player who happens to be in love with men off the ice, nobody in our community cares, we just want you to be happy."
