The NHL is getting its own Drive to Survive. But could it backfire?

bWith so many statistics, the NHL has a good story to tell. During the Stanley Cup Final in June, the NHL announced that the visitors would be present for the regular season set a record in 2023-2024, reaching 97% capacity per year (or approximately 22.5 million people). The league’s revenue last season was about $6.2 billion, also a figure of $6.2 billion new high. And the final between Edmonton and Florida took place good TV numbersespecially in Canada. Arizona lost its team, but Utah immediately adopted them with excitement. The salary ceiling will be increased during the summer went up and the unveiling of the new Fanatics jerseys went well. Even the fact that participation increased in the NHLPA’s player assistance program, which provides help with addiction and mental health issues, was good news, indicating that the stigma of admitting vulnerability is beginning to fade.

Financial growth, audience growth, salary growth and emotional growth. Is there any growth left for the NHL?

With the 2024-2025 regular season kicking off Friday with a game between the Buffalo Sabers and New Jersey Devils in Prague, Amazon is debuting Faceoff: Inside the NHL, a six-part series on Prime Video created by Box to Box, the same production company behind the popular Netflix series Formula 1: Drive to Survive. The NHL series, filmed throughout the 2023-2024 season, follows the same vein: a never-before-seen look at the sport’s biggest names, on and off the ice. “This generation of NHL superstars are modern gladiators like never seen before, with big personalities and even bigger playmakers, and we have the perfect partners to capture that energy for an unparalleled sports docuseries,” said Steve Mayer, Chief Content Officer of the NHL. said in the spring.

Expectations for Faceoff are indeed high. The official trailer, released in late September, has already confirmed some speculation. It includes a viral clip of the Toronto Maple Leafs’ first-round loss to the Bruins, when William Nylander, sitting next to Mitch Marner on the bench, told his teammate to stop crying, man, as Marner frustrated his took off gloves. . The clip itself emerged immediately after the game and, like Marner’s status with the Leafs, was the subject of intense and often vicious chatter all summer long — including guesses about what Nylander actually said. “OH MY GOD THEY ACTUALLY GOT IT,” an X user cheerfully placed next to the clip from the Amazon trailer, which confirms all previous lip readings. Aren’t we entertained?

Sure, but these viral moments are double-edged. In a league full of players chirping, discussing, venting and celebrating with equal intensity (not to mention endless gameplay highlights), more viral moments like this will come easily – they just need to keep everyone in the loop, the drama has already begun. there for the taking. And like any modern company focused on growth, it’s no surprise that the NHL, as it looks to expand its audience and revenue, is turning to shareable content to make that happen, especially the kind that’s anchored on individual athletes‘ to travel. But gaining that attention comes at a price, one that will most likely be paid first by those players as they become characters rather than people.

As soon as the clip of Nylander and Marner resurfaced in the Faceoff trailer, the same questions that swirled in the spring returned to Marner, and are so-called “beef‘ with his teammates reappeared as a topic of discussion. But what did that candid moment reveal? Was it anything more than a brief flare-up between teammates during a tense, frustrating playoff game? As much as Faceoff’s soul, like Drive to Survive, lies in reality TV, it will inevitably be shaped by the logic of social media. This is certainly part of its appeal to the NHL, which, like F1, is looking for an ever-growing fan base. But social media, a hyper-individualized space where truth is measured by commitment rather than honesty, bends reality in a way that will inevitably force the NHL to reconsider the value of its bargain.

What happens to your sport when social media clips become the truth? This summer at the Copa América, outspoken Uruguayan football coach Marcelo Bielsa thought the impact of that sport’s insatiable attention-seeking. “Football has more and more spectators, but it is becoming less and less attractive. Football is not just the five minutes of highlights… it is a cultural expression, it is a way of identification,” Bielsa lamented. “I think we should all ignore this scenario that they are imagining, in which the controversy, the accusation, the determination of who is guilty, becomes an obsession that deteriorates the atmosphere in which football should be played.”

There’s a trade-off looming for the NHL, somewhere on the line graph where the increase in followers intersects with the decrease in the number of people who actually watch and therefore understand a game. – in other words, it is the point where the content becomes the sport, and not the other way around. All sports struggle with the balance between the game and the business of the game and the NHL is no different. But pursuing growth always means a culture change. We’ll see if the NHL and the rest of the hockey world are better prepared for this shift than football or F1.

Pulling back the curtain is nice, but it inevitably distorts the perspective inside and outside the game. And it’s the players who have to deal with the consequences of the story being built around them at the speed of a social post. “I think you have to understand that part of the show is that they can contextualize the show as much as they want. It’s interesting how they cut it up,” Edmonton Oilers captain Connor McDavid told reporters when asked about his own viral moment, spawned by the Faceoff trailer (in which he yells at his teammates in the locker room). “They clearly have to create a story.” As for Marner, he said he “probably won’t watch the Amazon series.” That seems both a shame and a good idea.