Dumba makes huge impression When you line up all the Minnesota Wild players and pick your favorite, it could be anybody – Eric Staal, Zach Parise, Alex Stalock, Kevin Fiala, you name him. But from now on, make sure Matt Dumba is high on your list of candidates. Dumba is a promising young defenseman who rushes the puck with abandon, moves in forcefully from the point, and shoots as though he’s trying to get the puck through the netting and the boards and maybe the outer wall of the arena. But as of the start of the season, up in Edmonton where our pan-
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demic-restricted NHL West teams are huddled, Dumba showed a maturity and a social presence far beyond his 26 years. When the competition started with games on Saturday, while the Wild didn’t open until Sunday, Dumba was given permission to go out on the ice at Rogers Place before Edmonton took on the Chicago Blackhawks Saturday afternoon to open competition there. Both teams lined up around the center ice circle, and around Dumba, who is half Filipino and half Canadian, and he launched into a speech that was smooth and articulate, and incredibly emotional. He talked about how all the players of color in the NHL, as well as all the white players, had to band together and with unity see to it that any hints of racism in the National Hockey League be
A screenshot from Sportsnet.com of Minnesota Wild Matt Dumba defenseman kneeling during the playing of the U.S. “National Anthem,” after his speech about hockey leading the way to fight racism. eliminated. He spoke for almost three minutes, and if you saw it, you were hanging on every word. This wasn’t some slick politician, reading from a teleprompter. It was a 26-year-old emerging star from the Minnesota Wild, spilling his heart out in Edmonton. When he was done, Dumba dropped to one knee, and two players who flanked him, Chicago goaltender Malcolm Subban and Edmonton’s Darnell Nurse, put a hand on each of Dumba’s shoulders as though offering stabilizing support. Both are among the few black players in the NHL. Between periods, they played a video Dumba had made, showing him driving along a South Minneapolis street, where walled up buildings and the residue of destruction from the protests and animosity that had followed the police killing of George Floyd, which triggered enormous rallies throughout the U.S., and a reaction that seems possible to lead to real change in our racial attitudes. Well, in the video, Dumba performed an Academy Award performance, speaking in low tones about his reaction to seeing all the damage and destruction in “my
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town,” he said. Dumba is from Regina, Saskatchewan, one province this way from Alberta, where Edmonton is located. But every player on both the Oilers and Blackhawks, as well as all the Wild players, and every other NHL player, had to be overwhelmed with the dignity and poise Dumba showed in both his pre-tournament speech and the moving video that lasted several minutes. He remained on one knee during the U.S. “National Anthem” and stood up, with a clenched fist held high, during “O Canada.” The Wild then went out Sunday night and played close to a perfect game, with Kevin Fiala glancing in a power-play shot from the right point in the first period, Jared Spurgeon scoring in the second, and then Spurgeon hitting an empty net with a 175-foot shot at the end of a 3-0 victory over Vancouver, as exUMD star Alex Stalock got the 28save shutout to open the best-of-5 series. Whatever happens as that series goes on, if you saw Matt Dumba’s amazing performances before the games, you’d share my feeling that he’s one of the Three Stars every night.
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