On opening day of the 2026-27 season, the NHL dropped seven short audio dramas on Spotify featuring the names and likenesses of six real players, including Connor McDavid and Jack Eichel, framed like bite-sized romance audiobooks. Less than a week later, the league quietly pulled all seven episodes. The whiplash rollout has become a flashpoint for a bigger question dogging the league all season: can it actually turn a surge of romance readers into lasting hockey fans, or will stunts like this one undercut the trust it is trying to build?
A Seven-Episode Experiment, Gone in Days
The series, called Hot for Hockey, included titles such as Chasing Connor, centered on McDavid, and Jack of Hearts, built around Eichel, plus The Summer I Turned Gritty, which leaned into Trevor Zegras's reinvention in Philadelphia, according to The Athletic. Each episode ran between 30 and 90 seconds, used dramatic storytelling resembling a romance audiobook, and contained no actual scripted romance, the outlet reported. Every episode ended with a call to watch NHL hockey throughout the season rather than a promise of more content.
An NHL spokesperson described the project as one playful marketing activation responding to a cultural trend, and the league confirmed that the featured players had approved the content, per the same account. The NHLPA was not involved in the campaign and declined to comment on it. The league said pulling the episodes from Spotify had always been the plan, characterizing Hot for Hockey as an opening-week promotion whose closing message was meant to encourage season-long viewership rather than set up a sequel.
Authors Say the League Crossed a Line
Not everyone in the romance community is applauding. Maggie Bazdarick, who writes under the pen name Luna Frost and is known online as Moony, criticized the campaign, objecting to the NHL using real players in stories inspired by a genre built around fictional characters. She warned the approach could encourage parasocial relationships that blur boundaries between athletes and fans, the same account relays. Lexi Lafleur Brown, one of eight authors invited to a Nashville Predators fan event this year, called marketing real players as romance characters a dangerous line.
Tory Lindberg, a 31-year-old BookTok creator from Ohio who started reading hockey romance novels on rides to Columbus Blue Jackets games when her husband worked for the team, put it more bluntly: real NHL players are not fictional book boyfriends.
Arenas Already Chasing This Audience
Teams have been moving faster than the league office. The Predators hosted their first hockey romance night at Bridgestone Arena on a cool March evening, drawing hundreds of hockey-romance readers for author appearances, photographs, autographs and goodie bags before many attended a game against the Montreal Canadiens — for many, their first time inside an NHL arena, per The Athletic's reporting. Lafleur Brown, who grew up playing hockey in northern Ontario, said the night brought the online BookTok community together and created a safe space for people new to the sport.
Outside the NHL, other leagues have leaned in even harder. The Boston Red Sox drew 12,000 fans to Fenway Park for a theme night built around Rachel Reid's Heated Rivalry series, the most popular theme night in franchise history, while the Colorado Avalanche scheduled five book club nights for 2026-27 after a July event tied to Rebecca Yarros's Iron Flame drew more than 30,000 entrants competing for just 2,500 VIP tickets, as Hoodline previously reported. Author Lauren Blakely, who wrote her first hockey romance, Double Pucked, in 2023 after years writing baseball and football love stories, hosted a book event at a Charlotte Hornets game that drew roughly 600 fans on game day. Blakely said she followed her readers into hockey romance because readers were already there, and argued that book fairs at sports arenas could successfully bring readers into the sport.
The Numbers Behind the Boom
The underlying commercial surge is real. Sports romance recorded triple-digit growth in print sales in 2025, according to Circana, part of a broader wave that helped BookTok-linked titles account for roughly 59 million U.S. print book sales in 2024. BookTok has helped amplify the trend. Streaming has amplified it further: Heated Rivalry, originally a Rachel Reid novel, debuted on HBO Max in November 2025 and quickly became a cultural touchstone, while Off Campus, based on Elle Kennedy's bestselling series that began with The Deal in 2015, drew more than 36 million viewers in its first 12 days on Amazon Prime Video. Netflix is developing its own adaptation of Hannah Grace's Icebreaker.
The NHL itself has pointed to that pop-culture wave as a driver of real audience growth. League data cited by The Athletic shows female viewership rose roughly 70 percent last season, something the NHL attributed in part to the popularity of shows like Heated Rivalry. Commissioner Gary Bettman said the league joined the cultural phenomenon with Hot for Hockey, a project led by Sean Eggert, the NHL's newly hired chief marketing officer, who enlisted hockey-romance authors including C.R. Jane along with illustrators and voice actors to build the series.
Some Players, Authors Kept Their Distance
Not every player or author wanted in. Chelsea Curto and Emily Rath both declined to participate in Hot for Hockey, according to The Athletic's reporting, and the campaign's quick removal echoes a 2023 episode in which Seattle Kraken forward Alex Wennberg and his wife publicly condemned sexually suggestive comments from some BookTok community members. The Kraken subsequently removed their own BookTok-related content after previously promoting the attention it brought, a reversal documented by Business Insider. Jacob Tierney, commenting on the broader popularity of Heated Rivalry rather than the NHL's own campaign specifically, said in a recent SiriusXM interview that the league was not meeting the moment the show's success had created.
Why Authors Keep Pointing to League Policy
For some authors, the real obstacle isn't marketing tone — it's governance. Lafleur Brown writes fictional hockey worlds where women, queer readers and people of color can see themselves, and she said men's hockey does not consistently offer her readers that same safe space. She argued the NHL could improve belonging through meaningful community engagement, support for Pride and Black History Month initiatives, and policy changes — not more Hot for Hockey-style audio. Unlike the NFL, NBA and MLB, each of which has a formal policy addressing domestic violence, the NHL has no formal domestic violence policy, relying instead on commissioner discretion, as Ms. Magazine has reported.
Blakely sees a clearer path forward: the emotional and entertainment needs met by hockey romance novels differ from those met by watching an actual game, she said, but bringing readers from books into arenas is still a natural way to win over hockey-romance fans — if the league meets readers where they already are. That tension, between quick viral stunts and the slower work of building trust, is likely to keep shaping how the NHL courts an audience it did not create but very much wants to keep. The league now faces the challenge of turning a spike in attention into fandom that lasts well beyond opening week.
