The NHL’s flirtation with hockey romance didn’t last long.
After rolling out its “Hot for Hockey” campaign, the league pulled the plug less than a week later, wiping the seven audio stories it had already released from Spotify after they drew heavy pushback on social media. By Oct. 6, Sports Business Journal was reporting that the project had been discontinued, even though the league said it was never intended to run beyond the opening week of the season.
The idea itself was built around the growing popularity of hockey romance content. The league had pointed to the success of team-level efforts, including the Ottawa Senators selling jerseys inspired by the HBO Max series, Heated Rivalry, with profits going to Ottawa Pride Hockey.
The Empty Netters podcast said, “Teams in stadiums are playing songs from the (show) soundtrack.” Rolling Stone also reported, “The Bruins and the Canadiens have incorporated Heated Rivalry into their social media promotions.”
NHL chief marketing officer Sean Eggert framed the strategy simply to ESPN: “People fall for people. That emotive connection is really, really important.” He added, “Every player is a new way to reach a new fan,” and called the “romantasy” space around sports and hockey “a massive cultural force that’s happening in hockey.”
Commissioner Gary Bettman backed that thinking in an Oct. 1 interview. “The data is overwhelming in terms of new fans that we acquired last year who were first introduced to hockey either through Off Campus or Heated Rivalry. Since it seems to be a cultural phenomenon, we figured why not get on board.”
ESPN’s Emily Kaplan wrote that “Nearly 1.8 million people watched the NHL for the first time last season after watching Heated Rivalry or Off Campus, according to NHL research. ESPN’s average female audience during the 2026 playoffs jumped 164% from 2025.”
Before the shutdown, the league had planned to lean even harder into the concept. Sports Business Journal reported that the NHL had hired hockey romance authors to write and narrate 60-to-90-second pieces that would steer listeners toward upcoming games, while also bringing in BookTok creators to help spread the message.
The audiobook titles included Jack of Hearts, centered on Vegas’ Jack Eichel, and The Storm Between Us, focused on Carolina’s Sebastian Aho. The stories were not supposed to include romantic angles, but that still wasn’t enough to keep fans on board.
One of the league’s own young stars, San Jose’s Macklin Celebrini, had already explained why this kind of exposure matters. During a league-sponsored September photo shoot, he said, “It’s important that the personalities of hockey players are shown a little bit more.
“I think a lot of it has been kind of tucked away, like hockey hasn’t really been shown. There’s so many amazing guys and great personalities in our game and you never really get to see them.”
The league’s presentation of Matthew Schaefer made that point in a very different way. In a lengthy NHL feature, the first overall pick in the 2025 NHL draft by the New York Islanders - and later the Calder Trophy winner - was introduced in vivid fashion: “When Matthew Schaefer strides into Mustang Sally’s Diner at 2:03 p.m. on a Wednesday in early September, he is energy personified, all slicked back hair and bold movements, the picture of a kid just turned 19 years old with the world at his feet.
“He is running late, so the photo shoot prep happens quickly. Hair, makeup, styled in light jeans cuffed above black-and-white penny loafers, a white button-up shirt open two-thirds of the way down his chest, a white blazer, and sunglasses tinted ochre.”
That sort of styling is exactly what the NHL was chasing. But the league’s latest attempt to package hockey as a romance novel ran straight into the same kind of resistance the Seattle Kraken found out in 2023.
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