The NHL’s Hottest New Fanbase Didn’t Start With Hockey

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A few years ago, Taylor Swift walked into an NFL stadium and accidentally gave sports marketers a masterclass in audience development. Her relationship with Travis Kelce brought an enormous pop-culture audience into professional football. Some came for Taylor. Some stayed long enough to learn what a tight end actually does. Somewhere along the way, the joke about Swifties watching football became something much more interesting: proof that sports fandom does not necessarily have to start with the sport.

Now hockey may be getting its own version. Except this time, there are fewer friendship bracelets and considerably more steam.

Heated Rivalry, Off Campus, BookTok’s seemingly endless appetite for hockey romance, and a broader wave of hockey-adjacent entertainment have introduced new audiences to the ice. And the timing makes what happened next particularly interesting.

Come for the Plot, Stay for the Playoffs

Heated Rivalry premiered on HBO Max in the U.S. in late 2025. By February 2026, the series had reached more than 10.6 million U.S. viewers, becoming HBO Max’s most-watched scripted acquired series to date. Interest spilled back onto the page, too, with weekly print sales of Rachel Reid’s Heated Rivalry novel jumping more than 8,000% after the adaptation premiered.

Then, in May, Prime Video released Off Campus, another adaptation from hockey romance’s increasingly mainstream universe. The series reached 36 million viewers worldwide in its first 12 days.

Then came the actual hockey.

During the first two rounds of the 2026 Stanley Cup Playoffs, ESPN reported its female audience was up 106% year over year, while TNT Sports saw female viewership increase 66%. By the Stanley Cup Final, ESPN said an average of 2 million female viewers were tuning in, compared with 807,000 the year before.

All of this does not necessarily mean Heated Rivalry caused hockey’s audience growth. But the timing is notable enough that league and broadcast executives have pointed to shows like Heated Rivalry and Off Campus as possible gateways into the sport.

For advertisers, the question is not whether one television series created hockey fans. It’s what happens when a cultural moment changes who is showing up around live sports in the first place.

The Audience Is Bigger Than the Sports Segment

Imagine two people watching the same NHL game.

One has followed hockey for 15 years. She watches regularly, follows teams and players, visits sports sites, and is easy to identify through traditional sports-interest signals.

The other watched Heated Rivalry in December, spent the winter consuming hockey-adjacent content, followed a few players, watched clips during the playoffs, and is now tuning into a game for the first time.

From an advertiser’s perspective, they are sitting in front of the same live event. But they may look completely different in the data used to build a media plan.

Build a Core Audience and an Expansion Audience

Instead of treating “sports fans” as one giant audience, advertisers can build two distinct groups.

The core audience is the obvious one: established sports viewers, league and team followers, sports-content consumers, fantasy players, and other known fan behaviors.

The expansion audience starts somewhere different. Begin with the consumers the brand already wants, then identify where those people overlap with emerging sports interest.

For one brand, that might mean younger women with strong streaming and entertainment behaviors. For another, it could be high-income travelers, food-delivery users, auto intenders, or fashion shoppers who are increasingly showing up around sports content.

The cultural adjacency should support the brand audience, not replace it.

That means a skincare brand does not need to start targeting every Heated Rivalry viewer simply because the show is popular. But if the brand already wants to reach women 18–34 and that group is increasingly showing up around hockey, live sports may suddenly offer incremental reach the media plan would have overlooked a year ago.

Instead of asking, “Should this brand advertise to hockey fans?” Ask, “Is hockey now reaching more of the people this brand already wants?”

Keep Those Audiences Separate and Test Them

Do not lump the core and expansion audiences into one large sports segment. Keep them separate within the campaign and compare performance.

Look at incremental reach, video completion, site visitation, conversions, cost, frequency, or whatever KPI matters most to the business. If the expansion audience performs differently, you know why.

Maybe established fans still deliver the strongest results. Great. Or maybe the newer audience delivers comparable performance while reaching consumers the brand was struggling to find elsewhere. That is useful too.

The point is not to declare that hockey romance has created the next great advertising segment. It is to use cultural shifts as a reason to retest old audience assumptions with current data.

Because audience composition can change much faster than the targeting labels built around it.

A New Season, and Potentially a New Audience

As the 2026–27 NHL season gets underway this fall, some viewers will arrive knowing every offseason trade and line combination. Others may have found their way there through Heated Rivalry, Off Campus, BookTok, a viral clip, or an entirely unrelated corner of the internet.

Taylor Swift gave advertisers an early look at what happens when culture pulls a new audience into sports. Hockey may now be offering another version of the same lesson.

The takeaway is not to chase every crossover moment. It is to question whether the audience you think is watching is still the audience actually watching.

For advertisers investing in live sports, that can change how audiences are built, where incremental reach comes from, and which consumers suddenly become available in environments they may not have considered before.

Because sometimes the opportunity is not finding more sports fans. It is realizing that more of your audience has become one. And occasionally, that journey starts 400 pages before puck drop.

Want to see how your brand can capitalize on the growing attention around live sports? Explore Digilant’s live sports advertising solutions to reach the right audiences across CTV, OTT, and digital channels.