Should NHL Players be Considered Role Models?

Like the NHL, the NBA, NFL, and all other professional sports leagues, have their superstars. The NBA has Lebron James, the NFL has Tom Brady and Peyton Manning, while the NHL has Sidney Crosby and Alex Ovechkin. Can professional athletes like the ones listed above be role models to other people? Yes, but only NHL players. I say this because it depends on which athlete you look up to. For example, Alex Ovechkin donated a car to a Hockey League for mentally Disabled kids. Another example is that some NHL stars like Claude Giroux, Sidney Crosby, Scott Hartnell, and Ryan Miller went and supported a youth sled hockey team and played a little game of sled hockey. The NHL stars also let the team take a picture with the team afterwards. Things like this shows that professional athletes do care about the community and want to give back for all the support some fans have given them all these years. The NHL gets a lot of attention for helping out the sport of hockey because the athletes within the league take their job seriously and care about giving back to the community. Another reason is that the NHL has a good reputation, because on the most part, does not have the violent off ice incidents that the NFL and the NBA have had over the past few years. The only violent incident that comes to mind with the NHL is the Slava Voynov domestic violence case. The NFL has had many scandals over the past few years, like Deflategate or the Ray Rice incident. The NBA, back in 2007, had a referee name Tim Donaghy who would bet on the games he called and made sure he would win every time by making outrageous calls. The NHL is safer bet to have a role model because of the athletes within the league and the way they give back to the community and the way they help the sport of hockey in general.