A player in the Ontario Hockey League has been slapped with a big, five-game suspension for calling an opposing player – of all things — a “Mennonite.”
That’s, uh… a new one.
According to The London Free Press, London Knights forward Landon Sim was handed his five-game sussy on Monday, but the incident occurred in a game against the Sault Ste. Marie Greyhounds on Nov. 6.
Twenty-year-old Sim was given a game misconduct late in the first period in the Knights’ 5-1 win over the Greyhounds with the league saying that Sim had broken the league’s code of conduct after he “intended to provoke an opposing player that was marginalizing on both religious and cultural grounds.”
Landon Sim (right) is in some trouble for a chirp he let loose on the ice earlier this month. (Photo by Chris Tanouye/Getty Images)
Since then, Sim’s agent revealed specifically the 2022 6th-round pick of the St. Louis Blues said.
“He used the word ‘Mennonite,’ ” agent Andrew Maloney said. “He was insulted by a player on the other team, just regular back-and-forth banter. Landon used the word toward him. I think it was just something he said without knowledge behind it.
“Obviously, it’s wrong and inappropriate. It’s a teachable moment and something he’s not going to repeat now that he’s totally aware of it.”
Alright, I get the league’s abiding by its zero-tolerance policy which Sim ran afoul of, but what made me chuckle was how weird of a chirp calling someone a “Mennonite” is. Then I realized why that struck me as odd: it’s because I grew up in south central Pennsylvania where I played both high school and beer league hockey against a bunch of players who were Mennonites.
If they had been on the receiving end of Sims’ chirp they’d have been like, “Yeah, and?”
He’d have simply been stating a fact. It’d be like if someone tried to chirp me by saying I was “very handsome and smart and sneakily good at moonwalking with the right shoes on.”
Just facts.
While I think five-games seems like a bit much, there was a probably a better chirp in Sim’s chirping rolodex that he could’ve used and surely he will have learned a lesson, so we can all move on now.
