Was P.K. Subban right to compare NBA and NHL players?

P.K. Subban recently went viral for comments he made about the differences between NHL players and NBA players.

The former NHL defenseman said that in recent years, he feels professional basketball players writ large have been showing up on the court with less pride and less passion than their professional hockey counterparts.

Today on Commotion, guest host Rad Simonpillai talks to CBC senior sports contributor Morgan Campbell and culture critics Marlon Palmer and Andrea Williams about how Subban's comments sparked a broader conversation about this moment in professional sports culture.

We've included some highlights below, edited for length and clarity. For the full discussion about Netflix's Court of Gold and Mindy Kaling's Running Point, listen and follow Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud on your favourite podcast player.

Rad: Andrea, P.K. Subban is known for being this bombastic, and even at times divisive figure. But this moment felt a little different because he was tapping into a sentiment that I think a lot of fans are agreeing with…. Even P.K.'s haters were like, "Oh, he's kind of got a point." Where are you standing on P.K.'s comments?

Andrea: With all of those people you just mentioned. I'm that person that grew up in the '90s and … it's not the same. The product, to me, it's unwatchable. I get the divisiveness around P.K. and this notion that we don't want to hear this from him, but it's legit. And this is a guy who played in the NHL. They don't make the money that the NBA players make. 

I can remember this time where it was like you had to get on the floor and you had to be great. You had to be great over an extended period of time to get to this brand awareness, to become this superstar, to have this other stuff. And you can sort of bypass that now in the NBA; this is a byproduct of basketball becoming this global game. These guys are becoming these global superstars, and so now it's like they're phoning it in. That's real.

Rad: Right, OK. Marlon, are you feeling the same way? Or do you have a different take on P.K.'s critique?

Marlon: Well, right message, wrong messenger. I just don't like that he said it, you know what I mean? I kind of agree with him. I feel like a lot of his talk is really passive aggressive, and he's actually talking to LeBron. That's what it feels like, because if you just have LeBron in mind when he's speaking, it checks every single box. I think he didn't like that LeBron checked out so late before the All-Star game — could have given that spot to somebody else, someone argued. And LeBron, arguably, is still one of the largest players in the NBA, so him being on the floor for that weekend is paramount. And then we saw him [in the] first game of the Lakers back, after the All-Star break, and he played amazing. So for the fans that pay a lot of money to go see these players … he's a big deal, and he needs to act that way.

Rad: Morgan, what are you thinking?

Morgan: Where do you want me to start? P.K. Subban did a bunch of these rants, all sort of with the same theme, which was that NBA players are soft and entitled. Hockey players are rough, tough, dedicated, will fight for the guy next to them He said basketball players need to fight like hockey players do, even though we all know that, to paraphrase my good friend Pacinthe Mattar who was writing about the concept of journalistic objectivity: fighting is a white privilege. You cannot have a fist fight in an NBA game without people getting suspended, ejected, possibly having the cops called on them. I think that happened last year. So let's dispense with the idea that NBA players can go out here and fist fight to show how dedicated they are to each other.

And this is just such a false equivalency between the 4 Nations Face-Off and a run-of-the-mill NBA All-Star weekend, because the 4 Nations Face-Off exists because the NHL was having the exact same problem with its All-Star weekend that the NBA has every year: the fans weren't that interested, because the players weren't that interested, because professional sports are rough. They're rugged, they're intense and if you have an exhibition game mid-season, nobody's going out here trying to break somebody's neck in an exhibition game…. The talk heading into the 4 Nations Face-Off was whether or not this group of NHL players was going to take this tournament seriously. If this whole thing hadn't been politicized with the tariffs, with Trump weighing in, I'm not sure you'd get that line brawl at the beginning of the first game, and I'm not sure you'd get that same level of intensity. So there's all sorts of factors contributing to the intensity that we saw in the 4 Nations Face-Off that we don't see in the NBA All-Star game, and that we never saw, quite frankly, in the NHL All-Star game in previous years.

And to single out LeBron James passive aggressively, as Marlon pointed out — listen, if anybody has earned the right to take the night off, it is 40-year-old LeBron James, who goes deep into the playoffs every year. On the calendar LeBron James is in season 21. LeBron James' knees think he's in season 28. He deserves a night off.

You can listen to the full discussion from today's show on CBC Listen or on our podcast, Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud, available wherever you get your podcasts.

Panel produced by Ty Callender.