If you haven’t seen it yet, do yourself a favour and watch Tampa Bay forward Nikita Kucherov’s media availability from last night.
The Lightning star’s comments have been making the rounds on social media all day, and for good reason. In a sport where you’re hard pressed to get anything more than a generic “team effort…. Pucks in deep…. Do the little things right” soundbite from a player, Kucherov’s remarks were like a breath of fresh air.
Did he ruffle some feathers with his comments? Only if you’re a Montreal Canadiens fan. The rest of the hockey world couldn’t help but enjoy a rare glimpse into a player’s personality for a change. Anytime a press conference starts with a player coming to the microphone tarp off, beer in hand, half inebriated already and trying to give coherent answers in his second language you know you’re going to get some headlines from it.
Putting aside the hurt feelings of the Habs faithful for a moment though, fans want to see more moments like last night. Viewers have been begging more personality to come out of their favourite players for years now. Players like Connor McDavid, Sidney Crosby, and Nathan Mackinnon (arguably the biggest stars the sport has to offer) are superstars in their home markets, but outside of hockey companies, athletic apparel giants, and sports drinks, there aren’t a ton of organizations lining up to have the NHL’s best and brightest plug their products.
Why? Because outside of hockey fans, most people wouldn’t recognize any of the above 3 in any context outside an arena. Their social media pages are bland, their interviews are boring, their lifestyles away from the rink aren’t extravagant. In short, hockey players keep their personal lives guarded, and afford few glimpses into the “real them” outside of heavily scripted team produced content.
Where nearly every other sport has decades worth of unbelievable soundbites, and memorable moments, the NHL lags behind in the content department by a considerable margin. Even the one bit of PR magic that the league churns out annually, their widely praised “because it’s the cup” ads, are really just collections of wordless moments. This year’s version of players “leaving it all on the ice” was great, but was just videos of players throwing equipment in the air. Previous iterations inadvertently played up the “not much to say” stereotype with their “no words” campaign showing choked up players struggling to find the words to describe winning hockey’s greatest prize. If that were the only time player’s struggled to find meaningful words that would be fine, but pick any given game night and there aren’t exactly news worthy quotes flying out of NHL locker rooms.
This perception that hockey players don’t have much to say, or won’t say what they really think until after they retire is perhaps part of the reason why the league brought on TikTok star Josh Richards to be a “voice of the fans”. His job is simple: generate content. Even if people are hate-watching it (which I anticipate there being a fair number of viewers who will do just that), those are still eyeballs the league didn’t have before.
So before you condemn anything Kucherov did, or said last night, ask yourself this: Do you want the NHL to bring in more pseudo-celebrities like Richards to do their best Jake/Logan Paul impressions? If you answered no, then quit your whining. The Kucherov sound bites from last night have probably been viewed more times now than anything that happened on ice during the entirety of the Stanley Cup Finals.
If you’re a Montreal fan, you’re entitled to your sour grapes. Hell, you can even develop a healthy dose of dislike for Tampa or Kucherov moving forward. Hate is good for the game. Dislike breeds rivalries, and as we look around the NHL landscape right now, there aren’t too many heated rivalries to speak of. There might be some historic ones, but as of late it seems that anytime one of the participants is good, the other stinks and vice versa, making lopsided scores more likely than heated games.
At the end of the day you have to remember one thing: the NHL is an entertainment product. And last night’s press conference by a lot of metrics, was the most entertaining thing we’ve seen at a hockey presser since the beginning of the pandemic. Well done Kucherov, and congratulations to the 2021 Stanley Cup Champions, the Tampa Bay Lightning.
-Kyle Skinner
Twitter: @JKyleSkinner