‘Heated Rivalry’ Is Bringing New Fans to Hockey. Does the Sport Deserve Them?

The NHL besides pointed WIRED to its partnerships with Pride organizations around the US, Canada, and Australia, arsenic good arsenic pro-inclusivity enactment You Can Play, which it's been working with since 2013. The league said it volition beryllium hosting its 3rd yearly Pride Cup successful 2026.

NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman has said helium “binged” Heated Rivalry successful 1 nighttime and told reporters that each NHL teams bash a Pride night. However, arsenic the New York Times reported, that is nary longer the case, with a mates of teams opting for much wide inclusivity events.

Teresa Fowler, an subordinate prof astatine Concordia University of Edmonton and Tim Skuce, an subordinate prof astatine Brandon University, person some been researching hockey civilization successful Canada for years. Fowler is candid erstwhile she speaks astir the league’s clasp of Heated Rivalry, which she feels is performative.

“Where's your cheery person connected your team? You cognize what I mean?” she says. “It conscionable seems truthful hypocritical erstwhile radical are saying, ‘Yeah, we would invited them,’ and yet, the idiosyncratic who they telephone their brother, you know, that they would bash thing for, is excessively acrophobic to bare their soul.”

Fowler and Skuce published a study connected hockey civilization successful 2023, interviewing 21 elite players from the inferior A level and higher, galore of whom they accidental were existent oregon erstwhile NHL players. Fowler says she’s besides worked with younger players, including U18 players and younker hockey. One of the main issues they pointed to that fosters a toxic civilization successful athletics was hazing.

“They would marque players formal up similar women, and past spell into a buying promenade and sing ‘My Little Teapot.’ They would person notches successful their belts for intersexual conquest. But then, of course, there's the much carnal [hazing rituals]: drag your testicles crossed the rink naked, get successful bathrooms naked,” Fowler says. “It's conscionable gross. It makes nary consciousness to maine however this is squad bonding, nary whatsoever. Those rituals are sexism rituals, misogynistic rituals, wherever you're perpetually demeaning women.”

In 2022, a Globe and Mail investigation revealed that Hockey Canada, the sport’s nationalist governing body, had successful portion utilized players’ registration fees to screen uninsurable liabilities, specified arsenic intersexual battle settlements; past July, 5 erstwhile Canadian Junior Hockey players were acquitted of sexually assaulting a pistillate astatine a edifice country successful London, Ontario.

Hockey Canada did not respond to WIRED’s petition for comment.

Skuce, who played assemblage and AAA hockey, says a batch of the men he’s interviewed said they “felt uncomfortable” with the hazing but “they didn't privation to accidental thing astir it.” Team belonging is predicated connected going on with what’s happening.

Skuce says helium wants to spot a displacement distant from humiliation-based hazing rituals to ones that are much “inclusive.”

With the Olympics taking halfway stage, there’s erstwhile again the imaginable for a spotlight connected trans radical successful sports—a civilization warfare contented Browne says has created a “moral panic.” He coauthored the 2025 book Let Us Play astir the issue.