Note: Kevin wrote about this topic on Tuesday from a media/fan standpoint. Tim approaches it from another angle.

On Saturday night, Washington Capitals forward Devante Smith-Pelly skated toward the penalty box after a brief scrap with Chicago Blackhawks defenseman Connor Murphy. By NHL standards, it wasn’t a particularly strange scene. Smith-Pelly’s team was getting hammered by a score of 7-1, and T.J. Oshie, one of the Caps’ star players, had just absorbed a hit from Murphy. Given the circumstances of the game, retribution was required. This is how the justice system in the NHL works:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JbTVyKZJauQ

Once Smith-Pelly entered the sin bin, he was greeted with chants of “basketball, basketball, basketball!” by a small group of Blackhawks fans sitting nearby. It doesn’t take much of a logical leap to understand the implication of the taunt.

Smith-Pelly confronted the four fans, who were ejected from the game by security. The incident occurred in the middle of Black History Month and during the NHL’s “Hockey is for Everyone” campaign. In a postgame interview, Smith-Pelly lamented the continued presence of these racially-charged jeers decades after the integration of the game.

Smith-Pelly’s unpleasant interaction in Chicago called to mind other episodes of racism that made news in the hockey world in the past. Most Flyers fans will recall the banana that was thrown at Wayne Simmonds during an exhibition game in Canada in 2011. After scoring a game-winning and series-clinching goal against the Boston Bruins in the 2012 playoffs, Joel Ward was subjected to a nasty avalanche of negative, racist tweets from disgruntled Bruins fans. During a preseason interview in which he openly contemplated kneeling during the national anthem, Ward asserted that he has dealt with racism daily during his hockey career.

The Smith-Pelly incident made for an interesting juxtaposition with a segment that aired on Fox News last week. In a clip that became a major discussion point during NBA All-Star Weekend, political commentator Laura Ingraham attacked LeBron James for what she characterized as his “barely intelligible” criticism of President Trump.

“Must they run their mouths like that?” Ingraham wondered rhetorically, with the wistful tone an elderly bigot might take when recalling the “good old days” when black folks knew their place and shut the hell up.

Ingraham concluded her remarks by spitting the dog whistle out of her mouth and demanding that James and Kevin Durant “shut up and dribble.” In another time, we might have questioned why a Dartmouth alumna and a coastal elite was speaking so poorly of an Ohio high school graduate who capitalized on his talents and turned his name into a lucrative brand. However, such a perspective is no longer politically expedient:

But let’s leave politics out of this space. There’s no need to bring up the inconvenient fact that Ingraham fervently supported a presidential candidate in 2016 who, prior to being elected for anything, routinely criticized politicians for various perceived indiscretions or poor decisions; who, despite Americans re-electing President Obama as their “coach” in 2012, called the process a “travesty” and demanded a “march on Washington;” who made a political career out of doubting the legitimacy of President Obama’s place of birth and his academic credentials; and who throughout his own tenure as president has lobbed “barely intelligible” and “ungrammatical” criticisms at his opponents on Twitter.

No, we don’t want to explore this stuff. It would be an exercise in what Ingraham and her elite Ivy League friends would call a tu quoque logical fallacy. If you’re not familiar with this term, there’s no need to look it up; just imagine any argument you’ve ever seen on social media.

Besides, we talk about sports on this website. And, as we all know, sports and politics mix like oil and water.

At least that’s the message many of us are sending to any athlete who dares migrate from the playing field to the political arena. Sports serve as our refuge from the troubles of the world; we watch because we want to get away from frustrating political debates conducted by intractable pundits who seem to bicker about the same topics every day. We’re tired of the noise, of listening to it all. We just want to relax and watch a game.

It’s a fair point of view to hold, albeit a bit selfish. After all, athletes do not enjoy the benefits of escapism that we derive from sporting events. Smith-Pelly’s experience over the weekend reinforces the notion that players are not inoculated from the problems of the real world just because they don a uniform.

We also expect our athletes to be role models. We applaud when Chris Long donates his entire salary to fund scholarships, or when Malcolm Jenkins engages in his various endeavors to serve impoverished communities. When athletes fall from the pedestals we build for them, as Jahlil Okafor did several times during his short tenure with the 76ers, we blast the news on the Internet and on the front pages of the sports section of the newspaper.

We shuttle athletes into a pseudo-minor league system in which they represent a college or university in exchange for a free education. Yet when they employ this education to speak about the state of affairs between minority communities and police officers instead of how to beat a blitz, we get angry or annoyed.

We compel them to stand for a rendition of the national anthem before they go to work. We ask them to attend a ceremonial event at the White House when they win a championship. If they do anything to deviate from the script or otherwise ruin our made-for-TV patriotic rituals, we tell them derisively to “stick to sports.” Ingraham, or someone of her ilk, will exploit any instance of an athlete stepping out of his lane as more fuel for the perpetual outrage machine that powers our politics.

Instead of worrying about athletes getting too political, we should question why politics increasingly resembles sports. Turn on any cable news station at any time of day and notice how political discussions have devolved into something you might hear on sports talk radio or see on First Take. The issues of the day are debated with the same contrived intensity that colors a professional wrestling feud. It must be cathartic to watch someone with whom you disagree be “owned”or “destroyed” by a well-crafted talking point during a shout fest, but it’s certainly not productive.

The very people who claim to be in the business of informing us are too busy trying to entertain us. And that’s a much bigger problem than an entertainer trying to inform us.