NHL Announces Plans to Create 4 Committees Addressing League's Diversity Issues

The NHL is establishing four committees to address issues of diversity and inclusion within hockey and the league, per ESPN's Greg Wyshynski.

Kim Davis, the NHL's executive vice president for social impact, growth initiatives and legislative affairs, said an Executive Inclusion Council will field recommendations from three committees: a Player Inclusion Committee, a Fan Inclusion Committee and a Youth Inclusion Committee.

The Executive Inclusion Council will consist of 12 people: five NHL owners, five team presidents and two general managers. "That council is formed so that the ideas that percolate up from these [other] committees will be actionable and [executed] across the entire system," Davis said.

The Player Inclusion Committee will consist of current and former NHL players and women's players from the United States and Canada. According to Davis, "That committee will be focused on bringing ideas on how we can continue to build stronger pipelines for players, all the way from the youth system through professional hockey."

NHL chief marketing officers and "different partners the league has worked with in the multicultural space," per Wyshynski, will sit on the Fan Inclusion Committee board, whose goal will be outreach to underrepresented groups.

Youth hockey leaders in the United States and Canada will take charge on the Youth Inclusion Committee. "They'll talk about what those experiences for kids of color in our youth ecosystem have been," Davis said, "and to change the way that it's been so we can make the experience more welcoming to those kids."

According to Ryan Patrick Hooper of Detroit NPR affiliate WDET, there were only 43 players of color in the league as of Jan. 17, or less than two per team on average.

There are no black head coaches in the NHL. There has been only one in the league's history, as Rhiannon Walker chronicled for The Undefeated in 2018. Dirk Graham coached the Chicago Blackhawks during the 1998-99 season but was fired after 59 games.

There have been only a handful of assistant coaches of color in the NHL ranks, including Mike Grier of the New Jersey Devils and Frantz Jean of the Tampa Bay Lightning in the present day.

Per Ryan S. Clark of The Athletic, Leo Thomas was the only black head coach in any North American professional hockey league as of February 2019, working as the leader of the Southern Professional Hockey League's Macon Mayhem. However, the Mayhem parted ways with Thomas in November.

The NHL has room to grow toward developing more minority coaches who can serve in the NHL ranks, as Davis told Wyshynski:

Per Wyshynski, the new committees stem from an announcement at the NHL board of governors meeting in December in which commissioner Gary Bettman asked Davis to create a "multidisciplinary council looking at diversity initiatives at all levels of hockey."