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

By many metrics, the NHL has a good story to tell. Amid the Stanley Cup final in June, the NHL announced that its regular-season attendance had set a record in 2023-24, hitting 97% capacity on the year (or about 22.5m people). League revenue last season was roughly $6.2bn, also a new high. And the final between Edmonton and Florida pulled good TV numbers, especially in Canada. Arizona lost its team, but Utah immediately, excitedly adopted them. Over the summer, the salary cap 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 offers help with addiction and mental health issues, was good news, hinting that the stigma of admitting vulnerability is beginning to fade.

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

As the 2024-25 regular season begins on Friday with a game between the Buffalo Sabres and New Jersey Devils in Prague, Amazon will debut Faceoff: Inside the NHL, a six-part series on Prime Video, created by Box to Box, the same production company behind the hit Netflix series Formula 1: Drive to Survive. The NHL series, filmed throughout the 2023-24 season is along the same lines, a never-before-seen look at the sport’s biggest names, on and off the ice. “This generation of NHL superstars are modern day gladiators unlike anything ever seen before, with big personalities and even bigger playmakers, and we have the perfect partners to capture that energy for an unparalleled sports docuseries,” the NHL’s chief content officer, Steve Mayer, said in the spring.

Indeed, expectations are high for Faceoff. The official trailer, released in late September, has already confirmed some speculation. It features a viral clip from the Toronto Maple Leafs round one loss to the Bruins, when William Nylander, sitting next to Mitch Marner on the bench, told his teammate to “stop fucking crying, bro,” as Marner threw his gloves off in frustration. The clip itself emerged immediately after the game, and, like Marner’s status on the Leafs, was the subject of intense and often mean-spirited chatter throughout the summer – including guesses as to what Nylander actually said. “OH MY GOD THEY ACTUALLY GOT IT,” one X user posted gleefully alongside the clip from the Amazon trailer, confirming all earlier lip-readings. Are we not entertained?

Sure, but these viral moments are double-edged. In a league filled with players who chirp, argue, vent and celebrate with equal intensity (not to mention endless gameplay highlights), more viral moments like these will come easily – they just have to keep everyone mic’d up, the drama is already there for the taking. And like any modern business focused on growth, it’s no surprise that the NHL, as it looks to expand its audience and revenues, is turning to shareable content to make that happen, specifically the kind that’s anchored on individual athletes’ journeys. But gaining that attention comes at a price, most likely paid first by those players as they become characters rather than people.

As soon as the clip of Nylander and Marner reemerged in the Faceoff trailer, the same questions that swirled in the spring swung back at Marner, and his purported “beef” with his teammates reemerged as a discussion topic. But what did that candid moment reveal? Was it something more than a brief flare-up between teammates during a tight, frustrating playoff game? As much as the soul of Faceoff, like Drive to Survive, rests in reality TV, it will inevitably be shaped by the logic of social media. This is surely part of its appeal to the NHL, seeking, as F1 did, an ever-increasing fanbase. But social media, a hyper-individualized space where truth is measured in engagement rather than honesty, bends reality in a way that will inevitably force the NHL to ponder the value of its bargain.

What happens to your sport when social media clips become its truth? This summer at the Copa América, outspoken Uruguayan soccer coach Marcelo Bielsa pondered 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 propose to us, where the controversy, the accusation, the determination of who is guilty, becomes an obsession that worsens the atmosphere in which football should be played.”

There is a trade-off looming somewhere down the line for the NHL, some point on the line graph where the rise in its number of followers intersects with the decline in the number of people who’ll actually watch, and thus understand, a game – it’s the point, in other words, where the content becomes the sport, rather than 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 the pursuit of growth means a change in culture, always. We’ll see if the NHL, and the rest of the hockey world, is any better prepared for this shift than soccer or F1 were.

Pulling back the curtain is fun, but it inevitably warps perspective inside and outside the game. And it’s the players who are left to deal with the consequences of the narrative that gets built around them at the speed of a social post. “I think you’ve got to understand some of the show is, you know, they get to contextualize it 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 shouts at his teammates in the locker room). “They obviously need to make a story.” As for Marner, he has said he “probably won’t watch” the Amazon series. Which seems like both a shame and a good idea.