As a hockey fan, I say this with love: ice hockey is not currently one of the four major sports in America right now. It has a strong foothold here in New England and in other cold-weather areas, like Minnesota and upstate New York, but when you look across the country, it's clear that hockey is an afterthought compared to basketball, baseball, and football — including college football, which drew in 18.7 million viewers for this year’s National Championship even in its worst performance in 16 years. In contrast, the NHL, the world’s biggest ice hockey league, averaged 2.15 million viewers across six Stanley Cup Final games last fall, and the most-watched NHL game on record (Game 7 of the 2019 Finals) drew in 8.9 million viewers.
It’s easy to excuse this relative unpopularity of hockey as simply the natural way; hockey is Canada’s sport, after all, and America has too many other sports leagues to bother caring about one that “belongs” to our northern neighbor. Not to mention that it’s cold, extremely difficult to play recreationally, and challenging to translate to the TV screen without losing some of the sport’s intensity that is unique to the in-person experience. But this still doesn’t explain why the NHL’s ratings have been comparable to that of professional boxing, or why they still can’t overtake Major League Baseball, which was showing empty stadiums for many of its teams before the pandemic and has steadily lost the interest of Americans over the last decade. In truth, it’s the NHL’s own fault that they have failed to make Americans like their sport.
The first indicator of this in their advertising. The infamous “No Soap Operas, Just Hockey” ads became somewhat of a cynical comedic piece within the hockey fandom and certainly did nothing for any potential customers except perhaps alienate the predominantly-female demographic of soap opera fans. Similarly, their “Think Different” campaign that was composed of various hockey clichés like “That’s Pretty Mint” and “It’s In the Sauce” captioned over paintings of NHL players was so cringeworthy that the NHL deleted it from their social media not long after it was released. And that’s just the word to describe the NHL’s attempts at marketing: cringeworthy. Their creativity when it comes to advertising seems to go no further than getting their players to repeat hockey gibberish about cellies, snipes, and top shelves in front of a camera until they have enough footage for a commercial. Not only are these ads bland and awkward, but they also seem to lack any sort of target except those that are already fans of the sport; does the average American know what “top shelf” means? Do they care? More importantly, can the average American name a single NHL player other than Sidney Crosby or Alex Ovechkin?
This brings me to another issue: the inability to market its star players. It’s cliché to say that the key to a league’s popularity is marketing the stars, but it is a glaring problem in the NHL. Arguably the greatest male hockey player in the world right now, Connor McDavid, is barely known among Americans. Most hockey players have little to no social media presence. A handful of players stand out because of their personalities, but the league fails to capitalize in these instances, mainly because few among them are considered stars. Why hockey players come off as so stiff and boring to the public eye is an ongoing question regarding hockey’s culture as a whole, but I pose one major root issue: hockey lives and dies by team-oriented culture. The NHL can’t market anything in a way that seems to put the individual over the team, and as a result, their marketing comes off as lifeless and unnatural; it’s like trying to make an assembly-line machine look entertaining. If hockey wants to grow its sport, it needs to lose the condescending pretense that any individuality or identity is bad.
The last, and perhaps most important, glaring issue within hockey is the lack of diversity. Perhaps as a result of the conformity-first culture, I mentioned before, the vast majority of hockey players at all levels are white. The number of BIPOC players in the NHL has shown a negligible increase over the past two decades, compared to other leagues who have increased their racial diversity significantly. In the same vein, the hockey community is notorious for gatekeeping, with many fans having a tendency to goad (or “chirp,” if you will) anybody who is presumed (often unfairly) to not be a “real” fan, particularly in non-traditional markets. While this may seem trivial, it can do severe damage to the interest within communities who otherwise may enjoy the sport. It doesn’t help that hockey is inaccessible to many Americans due to excessive costs of playing, which includes gear, team fees, individual lessons, and often lots of travel costs, especially in communities where rinks are scarce. As a result, hockey is closed off to a large portion of the American population. Whether it’s the expenses, the overwhelming whiteness, or the gatekeeping, there are too many reasons for people to not like hockey. This isn’t necessarily the NHL’s fault, and they’ve campaigned to be more inclusive; however, it’s been mostly performative. Barely any real action has been made to make the sport more accessible or to change the narrative about its treatment of BIPOC players and fans. The NHL ought to consider why, if hockey truly “is for everyone” as they claim, they have failed to garner significant interest from underrepresented communities.
The NHL has hit the jackpot a few times when it comes to its marketing. Gritty, the Philadelphia Flyers mascot, was a huge success and has become an icon in pop-culture. Once in a blue moon, you may see a funny hockey ad, such as the Dunkin’ ads with David Pastrnak, or GEICO with the walrus goaltender named Duncan. But more often than not, they fall flat; take, for example, the SNL skit by Chance the Rapper that poked fun at hockey in all the right ways — only to quickly become unfunny once the NHL tried to put their own spin on it. In some ways, the NHL’s failure at marketing seems inexplicable, but a closer look shows that there are several identifiable root causes for it. Changing the league’s marketing blueprint must start there, and it’ll take new young minds to do so. Maybe even young minds from Bentley University.
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