Bruins fans hate the Canadiens — particularly P.K. Subban last night. Subban is black, great at hockey and sort of a pain in the ass, if you're not a teammate or a Habs fan.
Also, someone at TD Garden threw bottle at him.
These are all facts. So, it should surprise exactly nobody — unless you're into denying any of that, which would be dumb — that enough Bruins fans responded to Subban's goal with gross, racist nonsense for the team to deem necessary a statement of condemnation.
"The racist, classless views expressed by an ignorant group of individuals following Thursday's game via digital media are in no way a reflection of anyone associated with the Bruins organization," team president Cam Neely said.
Now, all of those facts — Boston's history of racism and general attitude toward Subban, specifically — made Thursday night's incident a little larger scale than the sadly boilerplate "Twitter users get racist when black player does something good."
There are reports that the n-word trended among B's fans on Twitter, though the metrics used to determine that are murky at best. Plus, it could've been fueled by people angrily responding to the initial tweets, though there's no real way to say. Also, the issue of racism in sports is, deservedly, at the forefront right now because Donald Sterling showed his ass on an audio recording, rather than a court deposition.
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That's getting pretty far into the weeds, though. The world has a problem with race. Twitter has a problem with race. Boston has a problem with race. Bruins fans, whether Neely accepts it or not, have a problem with race. Reasonable people should accept that and act accordingly. The only real good Neely's statement did was to acknowledge those facts to a group of lowest common denominators that probably don't care in the first place.
The guys in the locker room reacted predictably.
Hopefully, it helps. It was at least a step in a direction more positive than Twitter-searching the n-word, post black-player-goal, and publishing whatever pops up. Acknowledging the problem is Step 1 toward finding a solution — it's just obnoxious to see that people are stuck on that.
