In defense of NHL players, I believe they have by far the highest COVID-19 vaccination rate of any professionals athletes.
I can only think 2 or 3 examples in hockey, whereas there are a bunch of prominent football, tennis, soccer, and basketball players who went that route.
You might have to be a little nuts to practice long enough to become that good at anything, but hockey players, I would argue, are the least nutty of the bunch.
Part of that is probably that professional hockey players are virtually guaranteed to be from high SES backgrounds (compared to basketball, soccer, etc), which is correlated with scientific literacy and trust in institutions.
Can’t explain tennis. Maybe immense success in individual sports make people more prideful? Idk
The amount of international travel also had a huge impact. The NBA and MLB only has one Canadian team and the NFL has zero. NHL players had a lot more money to lose off not being vaccinated.
Edit: The Blue Jays also played a large portion of the pandemic in Upstate New York
