The National Hockey League is rolling out a “Hot for Hockey” campaign intended to build upon the success and popularity of the hockey romance genre.
League executives told ESPN they were going to court BookTok creators and market their players in a way that will “demystify what’s happening behind the helmet,” said Sean Eggert, the NHL’s new senior executive VP and chief marketing officer.
The NHL is releasing a series of short-form audio books on Spotify with names like “The Storm Between Us” and “The Summer I Turned Gritty” (we’ll hand it to them, the latter title referencing the Philadelphia Flyers’ mascot is hilarious) that spotlight real players, per Sports Business Journal. They’ll be written by contracted hockey romance authors, beginning with C.R. Jane, author of the Pucking Wrong series. “Hot for Hockey brings together the NHL’s biggest stars and fiercest matchups, told in a way you’ve never heard before,” the description reads. “Some will rise. Some will fall. All will leave us wanting more.” While these bites won’t be smutty or involve romance between players, they play off the tropes and tone of the genre.
At first glance, “Hot for Hockey” might seem like a good idea. Ice hockey has long dominated the sports romance book category, even if some of its most popular offerings attempt to rewrite less savory elements of the sport’s culture. This past year has seen television adaptations of books like Heated Rivalry and Off Campus inspire obsessive fan bases that have driven ticket sales at the so-called boy aquarium, also known as actual NHL games. A slew of hockey romance-related shows and movies are in the production pipeline.
The NHL did not respond to specific questions from Fast Company about the campaign, but did provide a statement over email: “This was a small way to give a playful nod to something that’s clearly going on in the cultural zeitgeist – among many different marketing activations. We were very proud to partner with real hockey authors, illustrators and voice actors in the space and we’re grateful the players were willing to have a little fun with it too and approve their creative.”
To me, this feels like the beginning of a movie where a group of kids stumble upon an old book of magic and start reciting spells, completely ignorant about the dark power they just unleashed. Except the NHL is a professional sports league that should know better, because they’ve tried this before and it has ended in disaster.
Back in late 2022, the Seattle Kraken began making content referencing BookTok, the TikTok community that discusses books, especially romance. Already BookTok was filled with videos casting real hockey players as their favorite “book boyfriends,” or male protagonists, often over images of said players stretching on the ice before a game. (As Heated Rivalry star Hudson Williams exhibited on The Tonight Show, these stretches look like . . . another kind of physical activity.)
Among BookTok’s favorite players? Alex Wennberg, then a center for the Kraken, who genuinely looks like a Disney prince. Fan-made videos and comments included lewd catchphrases like “Krack my back,” which some shouted at games. The team even invited a popular yet controversial BookTok creator, Kierra Lewis, who had been posting about the Kraken and its players, to take in a game live.
By late July of 2023, things had gone awry. Wennberg’s wife, Felicia, called some of the comments and videos “predatory and exploiting” on Instagram. Wennberg followed up with his own statement about the objectification days later: “The aggressive language about real life players is too much,” he wrote. “Enough of sexual harassment, and harassment of our character and our relationship.” The Kraken scrubbed their page of anything BookTok-related. Content creators were left holding the bag. The following year, Wennberg was traded.
The rise of Hockey RPF
BookTok isn’t the NHL’s first brush with romance. Since the ‘90s, a small but devoted subculture has written “Hockey RPF,” or real person fiction. It’s fan fiction that plays off the public personas of real athletes as characters in stories—many of which are romances between said players. RPF, more broadly, has always been contentious among fandoms. Traditionally, you’d have to seek that out in fan-run spaces like message boards or, later, fan fiction sites.
Already, social media has blurred the lines between fan spaces and famous people’s real lives. “Fans are treating every digital space like a fan space, even the spaces that you see these players interact on,” like their personal or team accounts, says Jess Rauchberg, a creator culture expert and a lecturer at the University of Leeds in England. She worried that by basically coauthoring a version of Hockey RPF, the NHL will further bring parasocial behavior to the fore.
Most fans of romance and members of the BookTok community are not going to send harassing messages to players or shout at them to kiss each other at a game. But this “Hot for Hockey” campaign, like the Kraken’s attempts a few years back, does encourage the small sliver of people who do think it’s okay to sexualize players at their place of work or surveil them digitally.
Surely, the NHL and its players already deal with overzealous fans. Fandom is the backbone of any sports league, and it can get vicious. Ask Kirby Dach, a Montreal Canadiens player who deleted his Instagram after a deluge of harassment following a mistake during a playoff game. Plus, the advent of mobile sports betting has added another layer of brutality to fan interactions with players.
BookTok and its related communities contain a different, but no less vicious, kind of fandom. The stars of Heated Rivalry or Off Campus, along with their friends and loved ones, have faced all manner of harassment, investigation into their lives, and other forms of digital and real world surveillance. Again, this isn’t the majority of people in these fandoms, who are just there to discuss their favorite books and TV shows, but certainly involves some of the most visible and outspoken members. BookTok in particular is known for its frequent, dramatic, schism-creating controversies.
“It’s a complicated space to be in,” says Rauchberg. “A toxic thing that has really exploded and festered in the Heated Rivalry space, is that there’s no room for nuance.” And that’s exactly how social media companies like it. “These are platforms that reward aggression. They reward outrage, they reward really big feelings that are responded to quickly,” she says. On Reddit, there are user-regulated rules that prevent people on hockey subreddits from making sexual comments about teenage players. Similar comments turn into rage-bait on platforms like TikTok and Instagram, and spread like wildfire.
There’s no reason to think that common fandom controversies, whether it be looking into body language or overinterpreting words from a press conference, wouldn’t ensnare hockey players, too. Especially when fans compare real, sweaty athletes to book boyfriends, who are mostly idealized, fantasy versions of men.
And let’s face it: There are ample issues in the hockey world worthy of highlighting. The issues with sexual assault, misogyny, racism, and homophobia, to name a few. Think about the men’s Team USA, which couldn’t make it hours after snagging its first Olympic gold before facing strident backlash over a celebratory call with President Donald Trump that included mocking the women’s team. All of these topics are catnip for social engagement—and probably not what the NHL wants to see circulating.
The second season of Heated Rivalry will also paint professional hockey in a less-than-rosy light. Rachel Reid, the author of the book, told me back in 2023 that she began writing hockey romance specifically as a way to reconcile her own love of the sport with her repulsion for “hockey culture and how clearly homophobic it was and is, and all the other things that made me really ashamed to be a hockey fan.”
Systemic toxic masculinity and homophobia are the overarching villains of the series, which come to be personified by the league’s commissioner in the later books. (That character has already been cast for Season 2.) The show does not call the league the “NHL,” and it created different team names.
Off Campus, meanwhile, has a closer relationship with the league. The show’s star, Belmont Cameli, and Macklin Celebrini, new captain of the San Jose Sharks (and BookTok favorite), teamed up for an interview with The Hollywood Reporter. The series includes real NHL teams. But even then, the villain is a longtime hockey star who abuses his wife and son.
The newfound cultural resonance of hockey is still an interesting moment for the league, Rauchberg says, and she understands why they’re trying to capitalize on it. She’s concerned about what it might do to further commoditize and change fandom from a labor of love into a way to make money or gain celebrity.
Plus, for Rauchberg, who has long been a hockey fan, there’s something uncomfortable about the NHL trying to appeal to women through the lens of romance. “It feels like this puck bunny mentality, like a women’s place in hockey is to be a puck bunny, not an athlete, not a sportscaster, not a fan, not somebody who could coach,” she says.
The league isn’t actually offering romance. It’s just throwing out something kind-of-romance shaped and hoping it will land. And maybe it will, with some people at least (though I have my doubts), but it’s tough to see how “Hot for Hockey” doesn’t harm players and fan communities in the process.