Comment: Performance Differentials in the National Hockey League: Discrimination versus Style-of-Play Thesis

William D. Walsh's article contains many criticisms of our explanation of performance differentials in professional hockey, as evidenced by his 39 citations of Lavoie et al.1 We shall deal here only with the major arguments and show that Walsh's reasoning is based on very shaky grounds. Actually, Walsh's main point was already considered in another article of ours (Lavoie, 1989). There, the stacking of Francophones and their favourable performance differentials were examined using hypotheses: the discrimination thesis, which is ours (Coulombe and Lavoie, 1985a; 1985b; Lavoie, Grenier and Coulombe, 1987; 1989) and that of David Marple (1975); the linguistic fluency thesis, which is basically that of Michael Krashinsky (1989);2 the reservation wage thesis, which was put forth by Marple and P. Pirie (1977) and Michel Boucher (1984); and finally the style-ofplay thesis, put forth by many sportswriters. Under the style-of-play thesis, Lavoie (1989:20-22) considered four variants: 1/ Francophones are reluctant to fight, 2/they lack work ethics, 3/they are too offence oriented, 4/ they are too small. Walsh's analysis is mainly concerned with the third and fourth variants.3