NHL Tried To Make Its Fans ‘Hot For Hockey.’ They Weren’t Having It.

In a win for normal people, the NHL has killed its “Hot for Hockey” campaign, putting a quick end to the league’s bizarre foray into sexualizing its own players to try to create more female fans. 

Announced the day the puck dropped on the 2026-2027 season, the “Hot for Hockey” campaign consisted of short, minute-long stories written and narrated by hockey romance (read: porn, but somehow trendy) authors. The stories would feature real players and loose interpretations of real storylines during the season. 

“The popularity of hockey romance in not only this country, but North America at large, even parts of Europe, it’s unmistakable,” Sean Eggert, the NHL’s chief marketing officer, said in a release. “You can’t hide from it. And so it’s a great opportunity for us to extend and reflect that culture back in our storytelling.”

Eggert went on to say that the “Hot for Hockey” campaign was aimed at a “younger cohort” and was meant to “evoke an emotion and a reaction from a consumer in a positive way to attend and watch.”

The NHL claims that players approved the use of their names and likenesses in the ad campaign, but I’m not buying it. Specifically because of the “Chasing Connor” spot.

A female voice reads:

“It was supposed to be a one-night thing. But when Connor McDavid comes to town, things have a way of… moving quickly. He’s fast, he’s electric, and just when you think you’ve got him — he’s already gone. Tune in to the NHL all season long for more Hockey Love.”

For those unaware, Connor McDavid is currently the single-best player in the NHL. He was drafted first overall in 2015, and the following year, he became the youngest-ever NHL captain at just 19 years old. In the years since, he’s won the league’s team MVP trophy three times, overall regular-season MVP five times, and playoff MVP once. 

Despite these accolades, McDavid has largely avoided the spotlight outside of the rink. He’s known for being remarkably introverted. He’s been described as a robot who lives and breathes hockey, an allegation he’s only really vaguely denied. The most interesting thing the public has learned about him is that he has an extreme phobia of ketchup. 

Does this sound like the kind of person who would sign off on a suggestive ad featuring a flirty voice and piano music in the background? 

The concept of a league sexualizing its players for ads is one that boggles the brain. It’s hard to imagine any other league — from the MLB to the Professional Women’s Hockey League to the NBA — doing this to their players. I simply cannot fathom the MLB putting out content implying some sort of romantic spark between Aaron Judge and Shohei Ohtani, or the NBA releasing a suggestive advertising message about LeBron James.

It’s insulting to the players, it’s insulting to their wives and girlfriends, and it’s insulting for the women who actually enjoy the sport. Why was the NHL trying to cultivate the kind of audience who would be interested in hockey not because of the skill of the players or the excitement of the game, but because the players are fun to daydream about? Nobody should be sexually harassed in the workplace, and that includes elite athletes at the hands of their league’s advertising executives. 

The “Hot for Hockey” campaign has its roots in the wild success of the television shows “Heated Rivalry” and “Off Campus,” which are both adaptations of “hockey romance” book series. NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman said 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’ … so since it seems to be a cultural phenomenon, we figured why not get on board.”

“Heated Rivalry,” the Crave Original/HBO Max series based on the book series “Game Changers” by Rachel Reid, is a gay hockey romance. The main characters in Heated Rivalry, Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov, are very thinly veiled characterizations of two real-life NHL superstars, Sidney Crosby and Alexander Ovechkin. 

Unlike Hollander and Rozanov, Crosby and Ovechkin have not, to my knowledge, had sex with each other, nor have any active NHL players. But that hasn’t stopped fans of the show from bringing signs reading “now kiss” and “the sexual tension is killing me” to games, or acting in such an obsessive manner that a team had to change policies at practices to protect players. 

The NHL should not be catering to these people or making ad campaigns to bring in more “booktok” fans who are introduced to the sport by what is essentially pornographic fan fiction about real people. In a healthy society, they’d be shunned as the weirdos that they are, rather than embraced as a potential fanbase. It is not normal to watch a sporting event and fantasize about the players having sex with each other. 

But on Monday, not even a week into the season, sanity prevailed: The seven “Hot for Hockey” ads were scrubbed entirely from Spotify, and now the NHL is backpedaling on the campaign. The league had previously claimed that the campaign would run throughout the season; now it’s saying it was always meant to be short-lived. 

An unnamed league spokesperson told the outlet Front Office Sports on Monday that the ad spots were “matchup specific posts created by authentic authors, illustrators and voice actors designed to run during our opening games in the first week,” and that “our marketing now is focused around many other activations including our Hockey Hits Different celebrity campaign, tune-in messages, and other initiatives.” 

The spokesperson did not explain the sudden change of plans in the campaign over the course of six days. 

As a woman who enjoys hockey, I think it’s fine to acknowledge some players are cute. It’s decidedly less fine for a league to sign off on an advertising campaign aimed at making women think about having sex with its players.

I’m glad the NHL quickly realized (perhaps because horrified fans were vocal enough to protest) that sexualizing its players is not the way to get fans in seats. The fact that this has to be said is a sad reflection of how low society has fallen and how pervasive “spicy” culture has become in everyday life.

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Christine Rousselle is the U.S. news editor of the Catholic Herald. A native of Maine and a graduate of Providence College, she went to her first Montreal Canadiens game while in her mother’s womb and has been a fan ever since.

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