Robertson, Stapleton excited for Jets' Filipino Heritage Night

The Winnipeg Jets host their first Filipino Heritage Night on Tuesday, honoring a robust community in the hockey-mad province of Manitoba.

"There's a very few amount of Filipinos, not only in the NHL, but in hockey," Dallas Stars forward Jason Robertson said ahead of his game in Winnipeg on Tuesday. "But I see a lot of kids growing up and they look [up to] me, and I see all the signs, in warm-up you see the signs, you see the kids and everything. I think that's very special."
Robertson, whose mother is Filipino, is a rising star in the NHL, and leads Dallas with eight goals and 10 assists in 12 games this season. The 23-year-old scored 41 goals last season while becoming the fastest player in Stars history to reach 100 points, doing so in just 101 career games.
"I grew up in Los Angeles so it was a heavy Asian community anyways, so you're playing with a lot of kids that are Asian, so it's nothing abnormal to me," he said. "As a younger kid now with a platform and the media and everything you can see now on social media, it's pretty special that you can have such a big role [as a role] model. Being so few guys, it's important that we are professional on the ice and off the ice. So it's great to be a role model."
On a per-capita basis, Winnipeg contains the world's largest Filipino population outside of The Philippines. Emigration to the Manitoba capital began in the 1960s and continues today, resulting in a deeply culturally-rooted community equalling roughly 10 per cent of the total population of the greater Winnipeg area.
"I didn't realize how many, I think it is 80,000 [Filipinos in Winnipeg], I started reading-up a little bit," retired player Tim Stapleton said in Winnipeg on Tuesday.
Stapleton, whose mother is Filipino, played parts of four seasons in the NHL, including the Winnipeg Jets' first season in 2011-2012 following the relocation of the Atlanta Thrashers franchise.
"It's important that hockey is for everybody, and to see more and more cultures get in the game, I know it's kind of progressing and it's going to take time, but overall it's, like I said, selfishly it's kind of cool to see Filipinos play and for me it's important," he said. "And it's important to be here, for me, for sure."

For Filipino Heritage Night, the team created a novel version of the Jets logo, with hallmarks of the design including the eight-ray golden sun and three stars within the Jets roundel, as well as the three colours of the Filipino flag overlayed to reflect "the integration of Filipino heritage into Canadian culture."
"That logo is amazing," Stapleton said. "I think it's just a cool logo, it's for everybody, kind of, right? It's just a really good design what they did."