“I know there are gay guys in the NHL, because I met one of my teammate’s boyfriends. [But] it’s impossible for a gay hockey player to come out within the next five or even ten years; the media attention would be too distracting for the whole organization, he’d never survive.”
–former NHL enforcer Georges Laraque
“Are you ready?”
The sports agent is preparing his client, one of the National Hockey League’s brightest stars, for a landmark public revelation. The player shrugs. “Sure, I’m ready. Let’s go. Let’s do this.”
The two men walk down the hall of the NHL rink the player has called home for half a decade, stopping outside the media room.
“Look,” the agent says, grabbing his client’s arm. “You know I support you a hundred percent. But it’s been a long road, and you’ve made so many sacrifices to get here. So if there’s any reason you want to pull the plug on this thing, any reason at all, just tell me now and we can cancel this presser in a heartbeat.”
It has made brand-new hockey fans out of queer folk who were never interested in the sport, and it has done so as far away as the United Kingdom, Australia, and even homophobic Russia. How did this happen?
The player sighs. “No, no, we’re not doing that. Listen, I’ve given this enough thought. All my teammates support me. So does management. And why wouldn’t they? I helped get them this.” He forms a fist and turns it around, exposing a gaudy silver ring bearing the team logo. “Besides, I’m set for life financially. I’m locked in with this group for at least three more years before the limited-trade clause kicks in. So what if I lose an endorsement deal or two? I wouldn’t want to shill for a company that felt that way about me, anyway. And hey, who knows? I might even get a few new gigs just for doing this.”
His agent smiles. “Can’t argue with that. Let’s go.”
Opening the door, the agent leads his client to the podium, where the player’s coach, general manager, and team owner await. The media event begins with the GM introducing the agent, who tells everyone how long and hard his client has been thinking about this day.
Then it’s the player’s turn.
“Good morning, everyone,” the hockey star begins, his smile signaling great relief. “You’re looking at the first NHL player to say these words in public: I’m a Stanley Cup champion who just happens to be gay.”
The flashes go off at once. A forest of hands goes up. The first reporter’s question is the most obvious: After all this time in the closet, what finally prompted him to come out?
“Well, it was a few things,” the player begins. “But the final trigger was the fifth episode of Heated Rivalry, when Scott Hunter has just won the Cup and invites his same-sex lover down from the stands to join him on the ice with his teammates and their families. And then they kiss in front of everyone in the arena, in front of the whole world. Well, I have a partner too—he’s right there at the back of the room, I’ll introduce you afterward—and I just thought, life is too short. I’ve achieved everything in hockey there is to achieve, and I just want to be happy in every part of my life. I want to be like Scott Hunter. So here I am.”
Okay, so that’s just a fantasy. As of this writing, no such thing has occurred because of Heated Rivalry or any other factor, and the secrets of closeted gay NHL players are safe for now. But the overwhelming success of the Crave series, a Canadian production whose US rights were picked up by HBO and caught on like wildfire internationally at the end of 2025, has reignited the conversation about homosexuality in the last major professional sports league in North America without an openly gay player. It has made brand-new hockey fans out of queer folk who were never interested in the sport, and it has done so as far away as the United Kingdom, Australia, and even homophobic Russia. How did this happen?
Until Heated Rivalry burned its way into our minds, the most notable onscreen treatment of gay hockey players was Breakfast with Scot, a 2007 Canadian comedy directed by Laurie Lynd and produced by Paul Brown, Howard Rosenman, and Nadine Schiff. Adapted from a 1999 novel, the film was a big deal at the time because the Maple Leafs approved the use of their logo and uniforms in it.
But it hasn’t aged all that well. Given the degree of reactionary homophobia in the mainstream hockey world of 2007, a film that might have meaningfully explored the struggle to embrace one’s own true self while ignoring what others think probably shouldn’t have been pitched as comedy. The titular Scot is a gender-divergent adolescent who, in the wake of his mother’s drug overdose, has been placed in the care of his stepfather’s gay brother Sam, a sports lawyer, and his partner Eric, a retired Maple Leafs player turned TV sportscaster. Within minutes of his first scene, it’s clear that the predominant schtick of the film will be Scot’s flamboyance and how the sight gags around it expose Eric’s hair-trigger paranoia as he tries to remain closeted at work.
By contrast, Heated Rivalry as queer cultural hockey content blows away everything that came before it.
In fairness, there is something potentially moving in a queer child’s innocent puncturing of the self-denial of his closeted gay parental figures. But there is nary a hint of true gayness in this film, which also happens to be completely sexless. And the characters are one-dimensional. Scot’s self-confidence in genderqueer expression seems unrealistic for his age and for the times, and yuppie Sam is too perfect. As for Eric? The comic appeal of his hockey bro uptightness and closetedness—even after his NHL career—fades long before the happy ending, when he embraces his more authentic self. But the Leafs—pre–Brian Burke and You Can Play—were good with it.
By contrast, Heated Rivalry as queer cultural hockey content blows away everything that came before it. For this we can thank the source material. Rachel Reid, a Halifax-based writer and lifelong hockey fan, invented a whole new subgenre of romance fiction: the gay hockey romance. Reid had become disheartened by the homophobia she saw ruining her favourite sport, so she came up with her Game Changers series as a way of imagining a better hockey world where gay men did not shut down their feelings but leaned into them. The second book in the series, Heated Rivalry, was published in 2019. Six years later, it became the centrepiece of a literally game-changing television series.
Heated Rivalry tells the tale of two NHL players who sustain a steamy romance while still living in the closet. For obvious legal reasons, the league itself isn’t named, and team names and logos are altered. Still, the Montreal Voyageurs and the Boston Bears clearly stand in for the real-life Canadiens and Bruins. From their first meeting at the World Junior Championship when they’re seventeen, the mixed-race Japanese Canadian Shane Hollander (who’s slated for Montreal) and the Russian Ilya Rozanov (who’ll be drafted by Boston) feel an instant, irrepressible attraction that refuses to fade, despite cultural and ethnic distance and their status as two of the game’s top young talents.
Somehow they manage to keep their relationship secret for almost eight years, secretly meeting for intensely charged moments of passion whenever possible—even as they move to the NHL and play on rival teams. Their families, friends, teammates, and the hockey world at large never suspect a thing, because both men present themselves as masculine and date women, and they are assumed to loathe one another as rivals (which is how they initially meet). Inevitably, their façade begins to crumble when they realize their bond runs far deeper than lust and they are truly, deeply in love.
Heated Rivalry is one of eight Rachel Reid novels centered on LGBTQ+ hockey players. After the books sold like wildfire, it was only a matter of time before one of them reached the screen, and it happened to be Reid’s good fortune that independent creator Jacob Tierney, the openly gay producer of Letterkenny (twelve seasons, ending in 2023) and its spinoff, Shoresy (four seasons, beginning in 2022, with a fifth confirmed as of this writing), was a fan. After acquiring the film rights to Heated Rivalry, and with the series produced by Accent Aigu Entertainment in collaboration with Crave, Tierney struck gold when Hudson Williams and Connor Storrie showed up for their 2025 auditions to portray Shane and Ilya, respectively.
Williams, a twenty-four-year-old Canadian of mixed British/Dutch and Korean heritage, hails from Kamloops, British Columbia, and earned his acting credential from Langara College’s film arts program. Before acting, Storrie, a twenty-five-year-old American from Texas, trained in gymnastics and spent part of high school in France, where he learned French and developed an interest in other languages. At the time of casting in Heated Rivalry, both Williams and Storrie were working as waiters. Within a few months, they would become international sensations thanks to their sizzling on-screen chemistry as Shane and Ilya.
Reid told interviewers that when she spoke with Storrie, it felt as if she were talking to the Ilya she had created.
The promotional push for Heated Rivalry began in early autumn 2025. Publicity stills depicted two handsome young men in their mid-twenties facing each other’s exposed torsos, foreheads nearly touching, eyes closed, lips inches apart. Ilya’s fingers rested gently around Shane’s neck while Shane’s arm wrapped around Ilya’s waist. Their hockey pants were open at the hips. By the time the series debuted on November 28, the image and the trailer were ubiquitous on social media. HBO Max had secured US broadcasting rights, with additional deals in the UK and Australia, and other markets crowded to join the Shane-and-Ilya phenomenon.
It was easy to see why. Beyond their complementary physiques—both athletic and smooth-skinned, Williams’s build being softer and more rounded and Storrie’s being firmer and more angular—their mutual magnetism felt authentic because the actors themselves exuded ease with one another. Later, Reid commented on how haunted she was by how convincingly they performed, and how perfectly matched they seemed for their roles—particularly Storrie’s portrayal of Rozanov, with his fluent Russian delivery and accent. Reid explained that during conversations with Storrie, she felt as though she was speaking to the very Ilya she had dreamed up.
I understood exactly what she meant. I hadn’t intended to watch Crave’s Heated Rivalry until after I’d read the book. Yet, even while I was reading, the names Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov lodged in my imagination as clearly as Crosby and Ovechkin. Thanks to weeks of pre-launch hype, I pictured Shane and Ilya as the actors who played them, because I’d seen enough of Williams’s and Storrie’s shirtless, glistening physiques in online memes and in the trailer, enough to recognize them on the street even if I’d never heard of them before the PR blitz began.
Social-media commentary about Heated Rivalry exploded after the premiere, overtaking my Facebook feed with an intensity unmatched by any previous pop-culture moment. The coverage ranged from ELLE Australia’s piece—“How Heated Rivalry became the romance attracting straight women seeking a break from men”—to Gay Culture Geeks’s post—“Just weeks ago, [Storrie and Williams] were waiting tables; now they’re rubbing elbows at industry parties with Baz Luhrmann.” And so on.
With six episodes in season 1, the series quickly earned a renewal for a second season. Heated Rivalry went on to become the most-watched show of 2025, with episode 5 matching the final installment of Breaking Bad for peak audience impact. By January 2026, it had accrued approximately 600 million minutes of viewing in the United States alone.
The show’s stars appeared as award presenters at the Golden Globes, graced major late-night talk shows, and served as beacons during real-world hockey controversies. During his February 28 guest-host stint on Saturday Night Live, Storrie shared the stage with the Hughes brothers, leaders of the U.S. men’s hockey team, who had just secured Olympic gold at the Milano Cortina Games. The presence of these players sparked a tense moment in the studio audience, given the PR fallout surrounding their post-victory celebrations, which some critics deemed disrespectful toward the U.S. women’s hockey team.
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From Cutting Edge: Hockey as Queer Culture — used with the permission of the publisher, Arsenal Pulp Press. Copyright © 2026 by Daniel Gawthrop
