Five Men, One Culture, Zero Accountability
Hockey’s next generation is learning from this fucking mess
⚠️ Content Note: Sexual assault, toxic masculinity, hockey culture. Also: strong language.
This column contains explicit references to sexual assault, power, and systemic failure. It also contains swearing. A lot of swearing. Because I am angry. Because we should all be angry. If that’s not where you’re at today, skip it. But if you can sit with it, I invite you to read on.
There is nothing “innocent” about five young men gang-banging a drunk girl. Having most—or even an entire—hockey team STFU about it and let the actions go unreported is evidence of a systemic issue.
Full stop.
I’m not going to get into the court findings here. I’m not going to debate the victim’s credibility. I’m not going to split hairs over how drunk you have to be to negate consent.
I’m going straight to the heart of the matter: five dudes, one girl, after the bar. You are fucking assholes. There is nothing innocent about any of you. Even if not a single law was broken.
(and I’m sure as hell thinking there was)
The Bro Code
I come from hockey culture. I don’t think there was a kid in my school who wasn’t at the rink every Saturday and Sunday morning. Scratch that—there wasn’t a boy. Girls weren’t allowed to play hockey. Because they were girls. They had to play ringette.
I joined the Markham Minor Hockey Association at age seven, after a year of figure skating at six to get ahead of the curve for that first puck drop. I played until Midget, when my then-coach told me I should stop because I wouldn’t survive the (not exaggerating) bloodbath of Juvenile house league.
I was a timekeeper for the Markham Men’s Recreational Hockey League, where my dad played as perhaps the worst goalie to ever don the pads. I even played road hockey a few times with legit—and soon-to-be-legit—NHLers.
I know hockey.
And dressing rooms? They’re shitholes.
I’m appalled at the language normalized in my 16- and 17-year-old Midget dressing rooms. Yes, it was a different time. But nowhere else on my teenage planet did boys let utter disrespect toward women run wild like it did when we were sweaty, half-naked, and smelling like the wrong side of a jock strap.
And damned right there were conversations about gang-banging (joking ones—none of us had the sway of a national junior player). There were conversations about regular banging. Or attempts. Or pushing past “the limit,” because getting girls to acquiesce to our wants—even when they didn’t want to—was the ultimate goal.
Let that sink in.
Boys, right?
Nope.
Sunday nights were worse: the men’s league. Part of my job as timekeeper was delivering the game summary report to each dressing room. I loathed going into those rooms—beer-bellied flaccid penises were the backdrop to being called a fag, asked when they let cheerleaders in, or accused of checking out their jocks.
The later the hour, the worse it got. They’d get progressively drunker.
Most of those gross-as-fuck men were fathers to kids in my school—or kids I knew from other schools. A whole whack of them had probably been at the same Catholic mass as me that morning.
They were different people then.
Before the masks came off.
This is what hockey kids are born into. It leaves a lasting impact.
I don’t spend time in change rooms anymore. And times have changed—I’m sure they’re not like the 1980s.
But they’re still “boys only,” testosterone-wafting environments where men let their hair (head and pubic) down. They’re filled with young players raised by some of the dirtiest churchgoers you could imagine.
None of those kids—none of those men—called anyone out. Not the language. Not the stories. Not the teammates.
Those kids?
They’re now the fathers of today’s junior players.
Coach’s Corner
I’ve got two words for you:
Don. Fucking. Cherry.
Okay, that’s three.
But any culture that reveres and rewards a racist, misogynist, homophobic windbag like him has issues.
Sorry—I had to get that out of my system.
The League, the Lawyers, and the Lads
It didn’t happen in a vacuum. It happened on a team. Under a coach. Inside a multi-million-dollar youth sports pipeline, marinated in misogyny and plausible deniability since long before acid-washed jeans and mullets were de rigueur for the all-star team.
And no one said a goddamn thing.
Not the players. Not the teammates who knew. Not the coaches. Not the agents. Not the sponsors. Not Hockey Canada.
The most organized effort around this assault wasn’t in the hotel room—it was afterward. It was coordinated silence. Legal prep. Media handling. The secret fund Hockey Canada had set aside for off-ice “incidents.”
They didn’t just let it happen. They were ready for it.
Let’s not forget: Hockey Canada quietly settled with the complainant in 2022, long before charges were ever laid. A big, fat, confidential payout—paid for using registration fees from kids across the country. While 10-year-olds learned to keep their heads up and pass the puck, their parents were unknowingly footing the bill for the sins of sons they’d never met.
And then everyone just… carried on.
Canada sent another junior team to the world stage, draped in the maple leaf and singing the anthem, while the rot sat there under the ice like a lucky loonie.
It took public outrage, dogged journalism, and years of pressure for the story to claw its way into daylight. And now, when five men are found “not guilty,” the system breathes a sigh of relief—like the problem is gone.
It’s not gone. It’s just had its tie straightened by PR.
Even the NHL’s response reeks of strategy, not integrity. They suspended the players—but only after the trial, only once the optics became unmanageable. It’s not courage. It’s branding.
Because the NHL isn’t in the business of morality. It’s in the business of butts in seats, jerseys on backs, and sponsors on helmets. If pretending this isn’t systemic keeps the puck moving, they will.
They have.
If that means scapegoating a few “bad apples” and letting the orchard ferment, they’ll hand out cider.
No one in these institutions ever asks, “How do we make sure this never happens again?” They ask, “How do we keep it from getting out next time?”
Looking for proof?
Just look to the National Hockey League Players’ Association, who—in the immediate aftermath of the verdict—released this statement:
“Dillon Dubé, Cal Foote, Alex Formenton, Carter Hart, and Michael McLeod were acquitted of all charges by Justice Carroccia of the Ontario Superior Court. After missing more than a full season of their respective NHL careers, they should now have the opportunity to return to work. The NHL’s declaration that the Players are ‘ineligible’ to play pending its further analysis of the Court’s findings is inconsistent with the discipline procedures set forth in the CBA. We are addressing this dispute with the League and will have no further comment at this time.”
You probably don’t want to be part of any association that actively wants men like this around.
Unless you’re part of hockey culture.
The Boys Are Still Watching
There’s a 16-year-old goalie somewhere in Moose Jaw who’s watching all this unfold. And what he sees is not a cautionary tale. What he sees is a roadmap.
Not just a how-to for winning games and climbing the ranks. This is a how-to for getting away with it—a cultural crash course in plausible deniability, groupthink, and the whispered promise that if you’re good enough on the ice, you’re untouchable off it.
He sees how you stick together. How nobody rats. How coaches, agents, execs, and old teammates close ranks fast when one of their own is in trouble. He sees the headlines get fuzzier with each passing day, the legalese murkier, the anger reframed as “media pressure.” And then eventually, he sees the boys skate again. Clean jerseys, fresh tape, a second chance.
He learns what every kid past Peewee eventually learns:
The only thing more sacred than the game is the silence around it.
That goalie might not say it out loud. But he’s clocking it, internalizing it—watching how the hockey machine shields itself, how it turns moral accountability into “distractions” and “unfair scrutiny,” how it grooms its stars to believe that consequences are for people who don’t put up points.
And if you think I’m being too harsh—if you think I’m painting the whole sport with too wide a brush—I invite you to explain how this keeps happening. Explain how this story looks eerily similar to that story and how the playbook for damage control never changes. Explain why we keep protecting the system more than the people it harms.
Because the kids aren’t just watching. They’re learning.
This Isn’t About the Courtroom
This column isn’t about what happened in the courtroom. There’s already a shit-tonne of commentary on that—legal breakdowns, think pieces, hot takes, and PR statements thinly veiled in euphemism.
This also isn’t about consent—though let’s recap, real quick, for the boys in the back:
Five men. One woman. Alcohol. Power. Privilege.
That ain’t consent, gents.
And it doesn’t fucking matter how politely you think you asked. Or whether someone else said it was fine. Or whether you misunderstood the moment.
You didn’t. You just didn’t care.
This isn’t about credibility, either.
We’ve built a system that puts victims on trial while their abusers sign endorsement deals.
If you’re still parsing trauma for inconsistencies like you’re doing a quality-control check, ask yourself why you’re so allergic to the obvious.
Listen to the victims. And put consistency way, way down the list—after humanity, after empathy, after the goddamn truth.
No.
This column is about five young men. It’s about their teammates. It’s about the coaches who looked the other way, the execs who said, “Let’s wait and see,” the fans who will probably chant their names if and when they’re reinstated, and the reporters who handled this with kid gloves and cushioned verbs.
It’s about a sport that teaches you how to hit hard, shut up, and protect the room at all costs. It’s about the silence passed down like a playbook. It’s about what gets normalized, excused, and expected.
It’s about culture. It always was.
And if you don’t think that matters, ask the kid in Moose Jaw, Corner Brook or Markham what he’s learned.
Because he’s still watching.
So maybe the real question isn’t what happened that night.
It’s what we’re going to let happen next.