While I appreciate the sentiment or whatever that is, the NHL has a fraction of the terrible bul*shit that the NBA, MLB, and NFL have...and they seem to be doing just fine, right?
I don't know about that. As far as bad things in sports goes, this is fairly well up there. I don't know there's a lot in those other sports in recent years that compares to a player in the league being sexually assaulted and a team effectively ignoring it because they thought it might hurt their playoff chances. A company is going to want to feel pretty good on the ROI of their sponsorship dollars to be associated with that.
EDIT: And that's not a comment on the league's response, I'm just saying that most corporations will spend their money where the eyeballs are regardless.
But sort of the natural flipside of that is that the less powerful a sport is, the more leverage their sponsors have. So while the NBA or NFL might say to a sponsor "If you don't like the way we run things, we have other people whose money we can take" the NHL can't be quite so cavalier with sponsors they want to keep. Remember, we're not too far removed from the NHL games being on the Outdoor Life Network in the states.
