OHL's Niagara IceDogs are under investigation... again

Just under three years ago the OHL announced a whopping $150,000 fine and an indefinite suspension to Niagara IceDogs minority owner Joey Burke and head coach/minority owner Billy Burke following an investigation in which the OHL uncovered that the pair had made sexist and homophobic remarks against a female IceDogs employee in a group chat.

Unfortunately, under new ownership it appears that things haven't really changed behind the scenes in St. Catherines. Yesterday, the OHL announced that the team is under investigation once again after multiple complaints of inappropriate behaviour involving team staff.

“Recently the League received some complaints regarding the organizational culture of the Niagara IceDogs,” the OHL wrote in a statement to TSN on Tuesday. “The league takes these matters very seriously and has launched a third-party internal investigation into the allegations.

“In addition, we have appointed Brodie Barrick, the league’s director of player recruitment and player support services to be on site to work with and support team ownership, leadership and players on matters related to our players first program.”

Back in 2022 when the team was first under investigation... things got ugly.

Leaked text messages were made public and were pretty damning against ol' Billy and Joey Burke. In fact, the public backlash was so bad that the brothers ended up selling the team.

Check it out:

Keep it classy, boys...

The Burkes then deflected blame in a public statement that honestly just reads like a lot of excuses to me.

Check it out:

Are you kidding me with this nonsense? You want a cookie for not using racial language? You want another cookie for having no allegations levied against you until... well until this? I can point to literally every other team in the league in the same boat. If you're operating under a "But this is the first time!" policy, it says a lot about you as an organization.

In any case, it'll be very interesting to see what sort of details go public from this latest investigation. One thing is clear though... when you're under investigation three times in a three year period... something's rotten.