I have no clue what was said and maybe you are correct what was said wasn't racist and that alone may not be suspendable. But when the insults and taunts are being hurled at Smith or any other minority because of their race then it is a racist taunt! We've seen it plenty of times when a black player does an offensable act on the ice the jeers and boo's are louder than it would be for another player.
What Ward said is important. I'm not saying what I'm about to say happened or didn't happen (none of us know if it did or not), but racism is not, and has never been, just in the form of the most overt, obvious, and clear-cut words. It's also in the form of any kind of differential treatment. Dog whistling is another example. Smith is a physical player and he plays with an edge. In playing that way, he takes penalties sometimes that you wish he wouldn't; but he's not a Sean Avery kind of player, a Matt Cooke, or a Brad Marchand licking players. In other words, he's the kind of player that other teams are worried about and other fans don't like playing against (maybe like a Jacob Friend on Owen Sound), but he's not the kind of player who crosses the line constantly and is despised.
We have a Guelph fan on this very board who said they don't recall him crossing the line more than other players, and this fan watched him for years. So I'm confident my evaluation is fair. Therefore,
if Smith was subject to insults at a much higher rate or to greater severity than other players...let's read between the lines. It's a way to express racism while still having plausible deniability. Sometimes these people can even fool themselves into believing they're not being racist.
An NHL comparable is Evander Kane. Kane gets grief all the time for being immature and his off-ice behaviour. Yet Patrick Kane had quite a few off-ice incidents, one that was similar in scope to Evander's, and you don't hear a peep about him. One is black and one is white. It makes a person wonder. If you ask me, they both were pretty immature in their younger days and should have gotten equal attention for it. But anyway, while no one is hurling racial epithets at Evander Kane that we know about, simply treating him differently because of the colour of his skin is a form of racism.