A critical look at how coverage of the NHL and PWHL frames Queerness, revealing the politics of who gets to define the game’s culture
In October 2023, the National Hockey League (NHL) banned players from using Pride Tape — the rainbow-coloured stick tape that, since 2016, had become one of the few visible, player-led gestures of Queer allyship on the ice. The official justification was uniformity. The subtext was unmistakable: Queerness, once again, was to be made invisible. Players, fans, and advocacy groups condemned the policy as regressive, arguing that it erased one of the sport’s only consistent symbols of inclusion in a culture still struggling with homophobia and hypermasculinity.
Most mainstream outlets covered the decision with the same procedural tone they reserve for injury updates or trade rumours. CBC Sports published a headline from the Associated Press that could have come straight from the league’s press release: “NHL Bans Players’ Use of Pride Tape After Previously Disallowing Themed Warmup Jerseys.” ESPN followed two weeks later with another sterile update, “NHL Reverses New Ban on Pride Tape in Warmups,” repeating league statements almost verbatim and quoting players and executives far more often than Queer voices. Even The Athletic, usually praised for its in-depth reporting, framed the reversal around the defiance of ally players instead of asking what the ban signaled to Queer fans, athletes, and staff across the league.
For Queer sports journalists, the lack of critical coverage said more than the ban itself. The absence of openly Queer perspectives in mainstream reporting reflected how hockey media — largely staffed by straight, cisgender white men — has long shaped who is seen as belonging in the sport. Rather than direct exclusion, this homogeneity sustains a narrow lens on hockey culture, limiting whose voices and experiences are recognized and legitimate. Sports journalism doesn’t just reflect hockey culture, it shapes it, and when coverage sidelines Queer voices or softens institutional accountability, it helps preserve a version of the game that remains comfortable for the majority and silent about those it marginalizes.
It’s within that silence that new forms of storytelling have begun to take root. In the summer of 2023, when Arielle Lalande, now 24, and fellow writer Avery Beaumont, now 25, launched Offside News Co., a Queer-led online hockey magazine, they set out to create a space where those silences couldn’t survive. Both had grown up feeling alienated by hockey’s culture of conformity, later finding community through Queer online fandom spaces.
What began as a satirical blog for hockey news shifted after the NHL’s Pride Tape ban into a politically engaged publication, using sportswriting as cultural translation rather than detached commentary. “We definitely take a more advocacy, op-ed based approach because that’s our lived experience in this sport, is of constant ostracization,” Beaumont says. “No one in the [mainstream] sports media landscape really calls that out.”
Mainstream hockey journalism, by contrast, continues to rely on the language of neutrality, which is a tone that flattens diversity in the name of balance. Largely, ESPN’s and CNN Sports’ coverage of the NHL’s Pride Tape ban read like bureaucratic updates; the verbs refused and reversed drained the story of moral urgency, as if the ban were a scheduling conflict instead of a question of Queer visibility and belonging. This stylistic detachment, often justified as objectivity, functions as a form of avoidance. It’s a way to report controversy without engaging with its human stakes — something 41-year-old Trans sportswriter and longtime media critic Frankie de la Cretaz has seen across 10 years of covering the intersection of sports and Queerness as an independent journalist. De la Cretaz notes that this kind of attempted depoliticized approach creates a “love is love kind of vibe” that erases the lived reality of Queer and Trans people, allowing leagues to frame inclusion as a branding exercise rather than a material commitment.
The dissonance between symbolic gestures and structural harm is most visible around Pride Nights, says de la Cretaz, where teams “put a rainbow patch on somebody’s jersey” while their owners donate to politicians advancing anti-2SLGBTQIA+ legislation. This surface-level allyship mirrors the media’s own habits: Queer and Trans fans and communities are rarely centred in coverage, while Trans people in particular are often absent entirely, folded into generic coverage rather than explicitly named. In mainstream reporting, ally players become spokespeople, and the founders of Pride Tape — Jeff McLean and Kristopher Wells — fill in as recurring expert voices. What gets lost is any sustained attention to the communities most affected.
Julian McKenzie, 32, has spent much of his career navigating both traditional sports media spaces and newer platforms, from his current work as an NHL staff writer for the Athletic to his background in broadcasting and podcasting with Sportsnet and Yahoo Sports. Through that lens, he’s seen how journalists consistently prioritize voices perceived as authoritative, while sometimes overlooking the perspectives of fans and community members.
“Maybe we should do a better job of going to certain fans or representatives of fan bases for how they feel about the erasure of something like Pride Tape, or if teams all of a sudden don’t care to highlight Black Lives Matter,” he says, adding that these voices are also critical for understanding the full impact of symbolic gestures in the league.
This tendency toward selective amplification extends to groundbreaking moments in the sport. Even when Queer players make history, mainstream coverage struggles to move beyond tokenism. In the Athletic’s feature on Luke Prokop, the first openly gay player under contract with an NHL team, Queerness appears as a historical footnote rather than a lived experience. The story dwells on congratulatory texts from fellow players and Prokop’s focus on playing his game, but largely avoids confronting the emotional cost of being the only out player in an environment with a history of exclusion. By centring only certain voices, coverage risks repeating the same patterns of erasure and superficial allyship.
“I think hockey, in general, likes to position itself as apolitical,” says Ava Wood, a 26-year-old hockey social media content creator whose Instagram account “365_hockeygirl” has gained over 20,000 followers. As a Queer, Black and Chinese American creator, Wood produces accessible hockey content about the Professional Women’s Hockey League (PWHL) from her own Queer-centric lens. Alongside some comedic, celebratory, and reaction videos to hockey news, she also uses her platform to highlight underrepresented narratives within the sport, drawing on works like Courtney Szto’s Changing on the Fly: Hockey Through the Voices of South Asian Canadians, which examines how race, belonging, and national identity shape the experiences of South Asian players and fans in hockey culture.
“There are things that cis or straight people just aren’t going to see and aren’t going to address in their reporting because they don’t want to be looking for it or don’t know to look for it.”
When Wood attended her first Chicago Blackhawks game, she posted a video on TikTok calling out the Chicago Blackhawks’ logo as racist, sparking both backlash and connection with others who shared her concerns. Despite receiving hate comments, she’s found a following by refusing to separate fandom from critique.
“A lot of hockey accounts, or just sports accounts in general, they’ll just present the facts of a story,” says Wood. “Even if you look at the Pride Tape thing, maybe the story is this is what the NHL did, this is what they said. But I think just being able to be a creator and say, this is what happened and this is what I think about it…just adds a lot.”
Wood’s approach, rooted in personal perspective and accountability, stands in contrast to the more detached tone of mainstream outlets and hockey accounts on social media that often avoid taking stances on identity or power or even acknowledging that power exists. That gap reflects the makeup of most hockey coverage and newsrooms, still dominated by straight, white, cisgender men, where the status quo is often valued over lived experience.
McKenzie has navigated this landscape from a position shaped by inclusion but also the feeling of needing to prove himself. As a Black journalist working in a predominantly white industry, he describes his experience in mainstream hockey media as “varied,” marked by overwhelmingly positive career moments but also by the reality that “there’s not a lot of people who look like you, and you obviously want more of that.” His reflections on coverage of identity-based issues reveal a broader structural gap. McKenzie noted that while writers from marginalized communities continue to push these conversations forward, real change requires buy-in from those who aren’t directly affected.
“It’s one thing for people who already come from those spaces to write about it and to highlight the issues that are there, but we need more people who are not in those worlds to care,” he says, noting that stories about race, gender, and Queerness in hockey should be treated as standard news, not siloed into niche coverage or left only to those with lived experience. For McKenzie, the issue is not a lack of talent or interest from marginalized journalists, but the culture and demographics of decision-making spaces.
“If you have more diversity in your decision makers and people in editorial managerial positions who can spot certain things, it definitely would help,” he says. Without that shift, coverage continues to reflect the perspectives of “white decision makers up top…who might only see one perspective.”
This lack of perspective in decision-making helps explain why certain stories in hockey media are framed in ways that prioritize powerful figures over marginalized voices, often reinforcing a saviour narrative. This also reflects a broader pattern within journalism where institutional power and dominant cultural norms continue to shape which voices are amplified and which are sidelined across a wide range of coverage in mainstream news. Similar patterns have appeared in the coverage of longtime NHL executive (now the executive director of the Professional Women’s Hockey League Players Association) Brian Burke’s advocacy since his son Brendan came out publicly in 2009. Burke, one of the league’s most powerful figures in the late 2000s as the former Toronto Maple Leafs general manager at the time, became an outspoken ally. Yet much of the reporting often centred his advocacy as an act of paternal courage over Brendan’s experience as a young gay man working in the sport or the realities of hockey’s systemic
homophobia.
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That same impulse toward surface-level inclusion defines the NHL’s “Hockey Is For Everyone” campaign, launched in 2017 as a league-wide diversity initiative. The campaign was marketed as an umbrella for all forms of inclusion: race, gender, disability, and sexuality, but in practice, its language was strikingly noncommittal. “Everyone,” in the NHL’s messaging, functioned as an abstraction: a word that gestures toward universality while erasing difference. Early media coverage, including from CBC and the Athletic, mirrored that ambiguity by repeating the league’s slogans and highlighting photo opportunities (players in rainbow jerseys and team tweets declaring support) without interrogating who actually benefits from this visibility or what accountability mechanisms exist behind it. When players opted out of Pride Night events or refused to wear themed warmup jerseys, many outlets described these actions as “personal choices” or “matters of belief,” framing homophobia as an issue of individual preference rather than structural exclusion, cementing a neutrality that denies the political reality of Queerness.
Yet McKenzie and Wood argue that fans increasingly want content that goes beyond the surface, contextualizing what’s happening in the world and how it affects the players they follow and the sport they love. In hockey where “a lot of people are super conservative…you can’t really separate politics out of sports,” McKenzie says, and clashes between media values and players’ values are inevitable.
“There are people in hockey media who don’t share the same values politically as certain hockey players, and it is fascinating to see those ideals clash at times,” he adds. Recent events, such as the 4 Nations Face-Off tournament in 2024 and the controversy over Wayne Gretzky’s political associations, illustrate why these stories cannot be ignored.
For independent writers like Offside co-founder Avery Beaumont, the unspoken rules of an elite culture of solidarity among the old boys club, aren’t theoretical — they’re lived. Beaumont writes pointing to his experience of seeing hockey shape his gender identity in “Queering the Game: How Hockey Helped Me Come Out as Trans.” He notes that he “credits hockey, in a large part, with why [he] came out as Trans,” and that engaging with the traditionally masculine culture of the men’s league has pushed him to critically examine how gender and identity are constructed and reported on within hockey media. Beaumont says the rest of the team is also influenced by their lived experiences, saying that “because a lot of us are Queer, we have that community-minded aspect and we want to focus on that.”
However, once the publication began gaining media access and NHL credentials, he felt pressure to soften his voice. “We were very flippant and had no filter,” he says of Offside’s early days. Beaumont and Lalande — alongside early contributor Kasey Lillejord, and Miranda Dagley, the lead of Offside’s merch — had “complete creative control,” says Beaumont. “We weren’t beholden to anybody,” he says. Their tone was irreverent, politically sharp, and unapologetically Queer — a direct rejection of the detachment that defines mainstream coverage.
But as Offside’s access grew, independence began to feel precarious. After the first year, Beaumont started connecting with people inside the professional sports world: one team’s vice president of ticket sales, a former NFL staffer, and eventually media coordinators at the NHL and PWHL. They loved the publication’s energy, praised their work, and treated them like any other credentialed outlet. “We went, ‘oh shit, we’re like a real thing now,’” Beaumont recalls.
That sense of legitimacy, however, came with pressure. “We definitely changed for a little bit. Probably for the worse,” he says. “We wanted to be taken seriously all of a sudden.” Though Offside never abandoned its Queer lens entirely, respectability politics began to seep in. Beaumont found himself trying to appear “digestible,” both on the page and in his public persona.
“I wanted to present myself as this kind of perfect, cookie-cutter Trans guy that people could wrap their head around,” he says. That effort to fit in, Beaumont admits, dulled his writing and distanced Offside from the Queer readers who had first embraced it. Queer fans as well as the editorial board began to notice, calling out the publication for adopting a more traditional tone. By the summer of 2025, Beaumont and Lalande decided to course correct. “We were like, ‘we can’t do this anymore. That’s not why we started this,’” Beaumont says. They returned to the voice that made Offside distinct: political, creative, and unfiltered. “There’s a reason people started reading us,” he adds. “It’s not because we’re these Goody Two-shoes who can fit in with the NHL.”
For de la Cretaz, whose decade of independent work has meant constantly navigating editors’ expectations, these pressures are familiar. Even when outlets want Queer stories, they often want them in a form that reassures their imagined readership. As they explain, editors frequently frame assignments around marketability, not community need, and writers face subtle pressure to broaden or balance angles so readers — often assumed to be straight, cis men — won’t feel pushed out. Freelance writing offers room to resist those pressures, de la Cretaz notes, but it also means choosing carefully which publications editors will actually support a story’s integrity and will allow them to pursue the angle they think is appropriate.
As McKenzie explains, the current media environment limits who gets to tell certain stories and how they are told. “We’re at a point now where journalism is shrinking and it seems like there’s less and less money being put into it…that usually results in fewer and fewer opportunities for people to get paid to express their opinions or get paid to write,” he says.
For McKenzie, this tension highlights the need to cultivate more platforms for diverse voices. He highlighted that representation matters not just in who appears on the ice, but in whose perspectives shape narratives in hockey coverage.
“Growing up and seeing people who look like me on TV, working in sports media obviously played a role in inspiring me to be where I’m at, and I think for other backgrounds, too, it’s applicable,” McKenzie says. He adds that expanding access to talent not only allows more diverse stories to be told, but also shapes who feels empowered to enter and influence the field.
In that landscape, Offside’s decision to reclaim its Queer, political voice represents not only a recommitment to its readers, but a refusal to pay the cost that access so often demands.
For Beaumont, the pressure to self-censor his gender identity mirrored the very dynamics he critiques in mainstream sports media. The fraternity of hockey journalism: its loyalty, hierarchy, and self-policing often rewards conformity and punishes difference.
“One of my friends, Charlie Huxley, has been doing research for months now, interviewing Queer hockey fans and asking them: how do you love a sport that doesn’t love you back?” Beaumont says. “It’s stuff that I don’t think any mainstream outlet is like, ‘okay, here’s a Queer person’s very personal experience with the sport.’”
Even when mainstream outlets try to celebrate inclusion, their tone frequently remains corporate. When the NHL reversed its Pride Tape ban in late October 2023 after league-wide backlash, the league’s statement relied on coded neutrality. Officials framed the decision not as a correction, but as a clarification emphasizing that players would “have the option to voluntarily represent social causes” — language that carefully avoids any explicit mention of Queerness. The rhetoric of personal choice functioned as a shield, allowing the league to appear as both inclusive and deferential to “beliefs” that oppose 2SLGBTQIA+ visibility. Most mainstream outlets reproduced that framing uncritically. Sportsnet, for instance, parroted league talking points while calling Pride Tape and specialty jerseys a “promising step, if performative, to promote inclusivity in a largely insular hockey culture.” Yet that acknowledgement lost its force when followed by a quote from deputy commissioner of the NHL, Bill Daly, who claimed the league simply didn’t want to put players in “a difficult position.” The league’s language, and the media’s repetition of it, transformed a story about the erasure of Queer visibility into one about individual expression, obscuring the structural nature of the harm behind the ban.
Creators like Wood focus on the importance of independent storytelling. Her work across hockey podcasts such as Gloves off Seattle, Asians in Hockey, and the NHL Women’s Hockey Report, aims to make space for conversations that the sport’s traditional media rarely foregrounds. As a racialized and Queer creator, Wood moves through the game with an awareness of how whiteness shapes what gets treated as “neutral” hockey discourse. She noted that discussions of race often prompt defensiveness from white fans who ask why such issues are being raised at all — an instinct that, for her, reveals the deeper problem. As she put it, the question isn’t why marginalized communities bring race into the conversation, but why the sport is so white and why we’re not bringing it up.
That recognition aligns with the ideas she encountered in Changing on the Fly, particularly Courtney Szto’s argument that marginalized communities do not need institutional validation to define their place in the sport; they can create their own cultural artifacts instead.
“As soon as I read that, I was like, ‘I feel like that’s kind of helping me give purpose to what I’m doing.’ Because I feel like that’s what Asians in Hockey is doing. That’s what Gloves Off Seattle is doing. They’re using podcasts as a way to tell their own stories within the hockey community,” says Wood.
That distinction between writing about inclusion and writing from the experience of exclusion becomes clearest in coverage of Pride events. In the NHL, Pride Nights have turned into ritualized exercises in image management, where headlines track which players participate, who refuses, and how the league handles “backlash.” After the 2023 Pride Tape controversy, most mainstream outlets focused on the league’s policy reversal instead of the Queer fans, players, and journalists who demanded it. Independent and Queer-led outlets, by contrast, wrote about the same moment, framing stories through emotional exhaustion and resilience, where visibility itself became an act of care, and a way of loving a sport that doesn’t always love you back.
“There are things that cis or straight people just aren’t going to see and aren’t going to address in their reporting because they don’t want to be looking for it or don’t know to look for it. And so you need people from the community who can see where those stories are or what might be missing from coverage in order to provide it,” says de la Cretaz.
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In media coverage of the PWHL, the tone is radically different. Queerness isn’t treated as a controversy to be managed or a “cause” to be supported. Instead, it’s woven into the fabric of the league. Many of the league’s most prominent players, from CJ Jackson to Hilary Knight and Marie-Philip Poulin, are openly Queer, and their identities are discussed in coverage as unremarkable facts rather than PR talking points. Mainstream and independent coverage of Pride events in the PWHL are covered less as moments of corporate performance and more as celebrations of communities.
In The Hockey Writers, an independent outlet, Karine Hains describes the PWHL’s Pride Nights as “hugely popular,” framing them as authentic expressions of belonging.
Even within more established media, that tonal shift is visible when the reporting lens comes from inside a Queer experience. CBC Sports reporter Karissa Donkin, a lesbian journalist in her mid-30s, has been one of the few mainstream and full-time reporters to cover hockey through that perspective. In her book, Breakaway: The PWHL and the Women Who Changed the Game, about the formation of the PWHL, Donkin devotes a chapter titled “She’s Gay Marcus” to examine how Queerness is normalized within the women’s game through the personal lives of Queer players like Marie-Philip Poulin and Erin Ambrose.
As Donkin explains, “It wasn’t necessarily about like, ‘let’s talk about the personal lives of these two players,’ but it was sort of a window for me into telling a story about how the PWHL is just a bit different — particularly with what we’ve seen happening in the NHL at that time, with Pride jerseys being banned and for a period of time and players not being allowed to use Pride Tape.”
Formed in 2023 after the unification of the Professional Women’s Hockey Players Association and the remnants of the Premier Hockey Federation, the PWHL’s emergence has also forced a shift in narrative power. Where the NHL struggles to reconcile Queerness with its image, the PWHL has accepted inclusion as a foundational value. The visibility of openly Queer athletes isn’t treated as a statement by media coverage, it’s simply part of the league’s new reality.
“In terms of the PWHL, I definitely think that that community is way different…because there are Queer players, and they can’t ignore that,” says Beaumont. “A lot of us feel a lot safer around people who write about the PWHL because [Queerness is] less of a taboo.”
That distinction extends to language. In coverage of the PWHL, words like community, inclusivity, and belonging replace the NHL’s corporate vocabulary of initiatives and programs. The tone, even in some mainstream outlets, is warmer, more human, and the writing often reflects a collective rather than hierarchical view of the sport.
Donkin’s work illustrates this evolution, balancing the access of mainstream reporting with the intimacy that comes from writing through her own Queer lens. Her coverage of Pride Night at Montreal’s Verdun Auditorium captured that sense of ease directly as Donkin described it as an inclusive and safe space that reflects the league’s atmosphere. The PWHL’s cultural openness enables journalists to report on Queerness as lived experience and inseparable from the sport itself.
Taken together, these shifts have broadened what hockey journalism can look like. De la Cretaz remarks that because the PWHL is still more conservative than many other women’s sports, seeing players feel comfortable openly being themselves is significant, and it has enabled media coverage to reflect the fullness of their identities, not just their player statistics.
Still, when controversy arises, the difference in framing reveals where editorial empathy lies. When the Athletic reported on PWHL player Britta Curl-Salemme’s transphobic social media activity, the story framed the issue as a distraction for the team, and quickly pivoted to focus on her aggressive style of play, emphasizing the “criticism” and “ire” it has drawn from fans. The shift in focus neutralized the harm and re-centred her on-ice performance over accountability. Independent outlets, by contrast, treated Curl-Salemme’s posts as a breach of trust within a league that prides itself on inclusion, a harm to Queer fans and teammates rather than a public relations inconvenience. That difference in editorial empathy doesn’t just alter tone, it redefines the story’s moral centre.
Despite being widely praised by mainstream outlets as a model of progress and inclusion, the PWHL still faces valid criticism within its own community. Wood notes that while many of the league’s biggest stars are openly Queer, the conversation around gender identity remains overlooked, particularly when it comes to Trans inclusion.
“In terms of the PWHL, I definitely think that that community is way different…because there are Queer players, and they can’t ignore that.”
“They have to really be pro gay rights,” she says. “But there’s so much more backlash toward Trans people, and also within the women’s sports space, gender is so heavily policed.”
These tensions expose the limits of mainstream narratives that frame the PWHL as uniformly progressive, offering visibility without addressing who remains marginalized.
In many cases, those limitations are tied directly to the platforms where these stories are told. Some narratives — profiles of Trans athletes, or even something as simple as a Trans woman playing organ for an NHL team — would likely struggle to make it past a mainstream editorial filter. Independent and Queer-led outlets are often the only places where such stories can exist without compromise, says de la Cretaz.
“There is a reason that there are certain stories that I’m not going to be able to write for mainstream publications and I’m going to have to write them just for myself,” de la Cretaz says. Independent and Queer-led media is needed to counter that narrative. In spaces built by and for Queer readers, writers like de la Cretaz aren’t asked to justify the value of the subjects they cover.
Other independent writers take this sensibility in different directions, experimenting with forms and metaphors that mainstream outlets rarely employ. Similarly, Silvia Leija Rosas’ The Ice Garden feature frames 2SLGBTQIA+ belonging as upholding a responsibility, not spectacle. Rosas uses the metaphor of a “playbook” to outline how the new PWHL Seattle franchise can embed Queer inclusion into its organizational DNA: through investment into gender-diverse sport clinics and Pride organizations, supporting Trans-inclusive policies such as locker-room access and anti-harassment, marketing Queer businesses, and fan engagement. The piece blends analysis with imagination, positioning inclusion as a creative process rather than a compliance task. This stylistic choice, using the language of play instead of policy, transforms the discussion from one of tolerance to one of progression.
Yet for fans and creators like Wood, the league’s significant efforts of progress often clash with its operational realities, creating a disconnect between image and reality that can quickly erode trust. She notes that while the league and mainstream media often projects progressiveness, the lived experience of fans tells a more complicated story. Wood points to how investment and corporate ownership, like billionaire Mark Walter’s backing of the PWHL, can create tension. Walter, owner of Major League Baseball’s Los Angeles Dodgers and the CEO of investment firm Guggenheim Partners, allegedly holds stakes in the GEO Group, a company that owns and leases private prisons, including U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facilities.
While his investment provides financial stability for the league, it also underscores how corporate power and profit motives can weaken trust with the very communities the PWHL claims to serve and celebrate. Issues like these — corporate entanglements, structural inequalities, and the policing of gender and Queerness in women’s hockey — rarely appear in mainstream coverage.
This absence of deeper analysis reveals a broader pattern; even outlets that adopt the language of progressiveness often avoid confronting the systemic forces shaping the sport. Instead of situating inclusion within the political and economic structures that threaten it, mainstream reporting tends to frame issues indirectly or as external pressures — more like risks to be managed rather than realities embedded in the sport’s culture. That distance reinforces a version of neutrality that ultimately protects institutional interests more than marginalized communities.
Collectively, these tonal and structural choices reveal how language itself defines the boundaries of belonging. In independent coverage, Queerness is not treated as an object of analysis, but the analytical lens through which stories are told. Positionality and emotional honesty become tools of critique. In mainstream coverage, Queerness is often managed through euphemism and distance, smoothed into the language of professionalism or corporate inclusivity. Wood identifies a similar point about the gaps in women’s sports coverage more broadly. She notes that professional women’s hockey, in particular, suffers not just from a limited mainstream media attention, but also from a scarcity of fan-generated content.
“It’s so much easier to become a fan of certain men’s sports teams because there’s so much more information on the internet, more stories being told about it,” she says. By contrast, with the PWHL, she feels a pressing need to create content herself to fill the void and ensure these stories are told.
In the end, the distinction between mainstream and independent hockey media comes down to who holds the byline, and what that freedom allows. Mainstream journalists, more reliant on access to teams and sponsors, often err toward caution. Queer independent writers, often working without those constraints, write from liberation rather than obligation.
“[Offside] is really a place for everyone to grow together, and setting your own editorial standards is a lot more intimidating than conforming to others,” Lalande says. “It’s also very freeing because you can set things up the way that you kind of wish they had already been set up for you.”
That sense of creative freedom is reflected in other independent hockey outlets. Together, independent publications and journalists are crafting a shared language that treats Queerness not as deviation but as an integral part of the sport’s vocabulary. And yet, as de la Cretaz mentioned, this doesn’t absolve mainstream outlets of responsibility.
“My personal belief is that when we as journalists, no matter what we cover, we should always be centring the most marginalized people in the room.” Their point underscores a central concern: independent writers are filling representational gaps, but legacy platforms still shape the broadest public narrative, and thus bear an ongoing ethical obligation to do so with care.
That evolution is visible even within legacy institutions when Queer journalists are the ones holding the byline. Donkin’s career at CBC Sports, for example, demonstrates how positionality can shift the parameters of mainstream storytelling — making space for care, emotional honesty, and social context within the conventions of professional sports reporting. Her approach underlines a broader transformation in hockey media: the understanding that authority doesn’t come from neutrality, but from proximity, empathy, and trust.
While the NHL eventually reversed its Pride Tape ban, the larger reversal has been cultural: a slow transfer of narrative authority from institutions to independent Queer, Trans, and racialized voices. These journalists are redefining what professionalism sounds like in sports media.
“We never claimed to be the next TSN or Sportsnet. We try and give our writers as much creative freedom as possible, especially when they’re talking about social issues, Queer issues, or really any other issue in hockey,” says Lalande of Offside.
That shift in storytelling now extends beyond journalism and into how hockey itself is depicted on screen. The Canadian-made television series Heated Rivalry — created by Jacob Tierney, writer and director of popular Canadian series Letterkenny, and adapted from Rachel Reid’s best selling Game Changers hockey romance novel series — follows two rival professional hockey players, Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov, whose intense on-ice competition gives way to a secret romantic relationship over several seasons. The series, which premiered in November 2025 on Crave in Canada and HBO Max internationally, has been praised for its frank portrayal of Queer intimacy and the complexities of love and identity in a hyper-masculine sport.
More than a romance, Heated Rivalry resonates because it centres Queer lives within hockey’s insular world rather than at its margins, showing characters who are both elite athletes and fully realized people navigating desire, vulnerability, and self-discovery. Its popularity has not only reflected a hunger for such narratives among Queer viewers and broader audiences alike but has also helped push hockey storytelling toward a more inclusive terrain. Originating in online fandom and Queer romance spaces long dismissed by traditional sports culture and media, the series’ move to mainstream television represents a significant moment in popular culture and offers a shift in what hockey narratives celebrate, challenging the stoicism and emotional silence that have defined masculinity in the NHL.
At the same time, the series also reflects the limits of progress when representation is filtered through mainstream media and marketability. Still, the significance of Heated Rivalry lies in its possibility. Like independent hockey journalism, it widens the imaginative boundaries of hockey culture, suggesting that the stories fans connect to — and the identities worth centring — are far broader than legacy media has historically allowed.
Hockey has always been a game of possession. Who controls the puck, who controls the ice. But the more telling battle now is over language: who controls the narrative. In the hands of independent voices, the game finally sounds more accessible to Queer fans.
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