Almost a year ago, Colorado Avalanche goaltender Semyon Varlamov was arrested on domestic violence charges. His girlfriend made several specific allegations, and police noted bruising on her forearm and hip. Two days later he started in goal against the Dallas Stars, and Colorado won 3-2 in overtime. When asked at the morning skate why he was starting Varlamov, Colorado coach Patrick Roy said, “Why wait?”

The charges were eventually dropped nearly two months later, just before Christmas. Lynn Kimbrough, a spokeswoman for the Denver District Attorney’s Office, told reporters additional interviews with witnesses led to the decision, as their stories shifted. Kimbrough said, “This is not an indication that we didn’t believe our victim. It is . . . simply not having the ability to prove it.” At no point did the NHL intervene.

Monday, the NHL announced that Los Angeles Kings defenceman Slava Voynov has been suspended indefinitely with pay following an arrest for domestic violence. He has not yet been charged. Redondo Beach police told the Orange County Register that a woman was taken to hospital Sunday night with injuries that required immediate treatment; that the ER staff was alarmed and called the police; that the police determined charges were warranted. Voynov apparently has a girlfriend, and there was a child in the home.

The suspension is, in its own way, the easy part. The climate around domestic violence and lawbreaking in sports has changed like the weather, and now everybody knows it’s raining. The security tape of Ray Rice striking his then-fiancée Janay Palmer was revealed by TMZ in September, and suddenly people saw what those anodyne words mean, domestic violence. The reaction was a storm.

And so, pro sports is finding some sort of religion. After Rice, the Carolina Panthers benched Greg Hardy, their star defensive end who was playing while appealing a judge’s conviction on domestic violence charges, and Carolina coach Ron Rivera told reporters, “I don’t know if it was new information as much as it was changes in the climate.” The Minnesota Vikings suspended star running back Adrian Peterson following his arrest for felony child abuse in Texas, tried to reinstate him after one game, and were buried by a tidal wave of public opinion that reached their sponsors. San Francisco left defensive end Ray McDonald in the lineup after he was charged with assaulting his pregnant fiancée, and the 49ers became the outlier.

There was a little smugness among some hockey fans, and even commissioner Gary Bettman, in an otherwise nuanced answer about how the league addresses off-ice issues, said, “Our players know what’s right and wrong.”

The NHL clearly made the correct call here, though, while dealing with the defending Stanley Cup champions. I don’t know whether Voynov is guilty, and neither do you. I don’t know exactly what happened with Varlamov. I know that prosecuting domestic violence is a messy and difficult thing, even if there isn’t a professional athlete involved.

But the presumption of innocence doesn’t mean nothing should change. It’s public relations, of course. Pro sports cares about issues insofar as they affect the bottom line, which makes them not unlike most major businesses.

What that tells you, though, is how the public feelings have changed the relations. Before Ray Rice, the calculation was made that the public didn’t care enough about what the players had done, with certain exceptions. Sports already makes us forgive and forget so quickly, in such tribal fashion. Now, even the WWE, where wrestlers have long been canaries in coal mines, has a zero-tolerance standard for domestic abuse. The NHL suspended Voynov under Article 18-A.5 of the CBA, which concludes a suspension can happen if the alternative “would create a substantial risk of material harm to the legitimate interests and/or reputation of the League.”

It’s better, right? At least for now? (The Vikings recently replaced the main sponsor who left after the Peterson mess.) Professional athletes mean something different than movie stars, if only because they are still binding forces in their communities, and held up by their industry — and sometimes by the media, in fairness — as heroes. In Toronto, the only things that bring the city together are traffic, Rob Ford (open Rob Ford's policard) and the Toronto Maple Leafs. That matters.

But remember the summer of 2003, when Kobe Bryant was accused of rape? He spent part of the 2004 playoffs flying from a Colorado courtroom in the morning to the arena at night, and the networks showed him arriving for the game, ready to play. The charges were dropped after the accuser refused to testify; Bryant later settled a civil suit for an undisclosed sum.

If it all happened today, would Bryant be on the court? Maybe not anymore. Today, owner Donald Sterling can get run out of the NBA for being a racist, and owner Bruce Levenson can get chased as well.

Someone will probably push this new reality too far, one of these days. But there’s some small comfort, as sports cements itself as the most powerful force in television, as the entertainment colossus of our age, that it can at least pretend to care.