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League structure & schedule
The real NHL has 32 teams, divided into eastern and western 16-team conferences, which are then divided into 8-team divisions. At the time Heated Rivalry started, the NHL had 30 teams with the Western conference having only 14 teams. The names obviously are different and some of the cities in the show (Houston vs Dallas, San Francisco versus San Jose), so I won’t go into details of the real league.
List of teams in the Game Changers Universe
From 1998-2013 the NHL had six smaller divisions, but for most of the time they’ve had divisions there were four. Originally called Adams, Patrick, Norris and Smythe after some old hockey men, they are currently called Atlantic (Boston, Montréal, Ottawa are here), Metropolitan (the NY metro teams are here), Central and Pacific. The Eastern Conference used to be called Wales and the Western Campbell, which are now just the names of the trophies for the conference champions. Some players are superstitious about touching the conference trophies when they win them, in case it jinxes them in the upcoming Final (note it's in the singular, not "Finals"). Most players are superstitious about touching the Stanley Cup unless they’ve just won it. The Final is always between the western and eastern champions, apart from in 2020, when covid messed things up. Montréal/Boston or Montréal/Ottawa are likely to meet in the playoffs in the first or second round. The last possible matchup is the Eastern Conference Final if one of the teams got in as a wild card and crossed over divisions for the early rounds.
There are 82 games (not matches, unless you’re speaking French) in a season, rising to 84 as of 2026. You play 3 or 4 games a season against your divisional opponents (Boston vs Montréal, Ottawa versus Montréal), 3 against conference opponents (Boston or Montréal vs New York), and 2 (one each home and road, so each team plays at least once in every arena) against teams in the opposite conference,.
NHL teams travel by chartered jet and stay in 4 star hotels on the road. Within the NYC and LA metros, they bus between arenas. Philadelphia to NYC (and maybe Washington?) is by train. Ottawa and Montréal could be by train if Canada ever manages high-speed rail, but it's currently flying. Amateur and minor leagues are mostly bus, commercial air if necessary. Because NHLers are flying charters, they often don't fly in and out of the major commercial airport for the city, but a smaller general aviation airport, like Westchester County Airport for New York, Saint-Hubert Airport for Montréal, or Hanscom Field for Boston.
In the real NHL, players who were no longer on their entry-level contracts could not be made to share rooms on the road after 2013. For fictional purposes we still see roommates up until the end of Heated Rivalry in 2017.
Drinking alcohol in the team hotel or on the team plane is not allowed unless the head coach or the team’s general manager gives permission.
Generally teams will fly out late (11PM-12PM) on the night of a game so they have more time to prepare and practice the following day in whatever city they are playing next. Again this is something Rachel changed for dramatic purposes, but if you want to write them meeting up the night before a game, that also works. Some teams like Vancouver, who have brutal travel distances, have experimented with flying the morning after a game, as arriving at your hotel at 3AM doesn’t lead to good sleep.
What might they do on those planes, as well as watching films where Rose Landry gets kidnapped? Card games are a popular choice, among other things.
The league will try to group up distant road trips when scheduling to reduce travel, so Montréal might have a “west coast swing” where they play Colorado, the three California teams and Vancouver, or one where they play Carolina and the two Florida teams, etc.
Mostly there are one or two days between games, occasionally three, and sometimes they’re back to back. On non-game days, teams usually practice in the morning. “Optional skate” doesn’t mean you get to stay at home - you still need to be at the rink to do video sessions, work out, and get medical treatment if necessary. Only the skating part is optional, and it’s not optional if you are a young player or a bottom of the lineup player. If a player is a bit banged up or sick, he can be allowed to miss even a mandatory skate. This is called a maintenance day.
There’s often a meeting or video session for each special team (power play/penalty kill). There are two power play units (5 players) and two penalty kill units (4 players). The best defensive players are on the first PK and the best offensive on the top PP. You can be on both special teams, but Shane and Ilya are unlikely to be on the first PK unit because the coach doesn’t want to tire them out killing penalties so they don’t get as many opportunities to score.
Most NHL teams have a separate practice facility with all the same facilities (sauna, cold tubs, weight room/gym, player lounge, video room, coach’s offices) as the arena, sometimes even nicer. There’s a separate room where players take off their street clothes to not have them in the room with sweaty gear, although the stalls are vented and the room is dehumidified to help with that. In Canada the term “dressing room” is often used instead of “locker room”. “The room” is also used as a figure of speech for the social/emotional aspect of the room. “Ilya, what’s the mood in the room with this three-game losing streak?”
The practice facility may have multiple ice sheets and double as a community ice rink for rental when the NHL team isn’t using it (with other public locker rooms as the team’s off-ice facilities are private).
The captain or alternates will run informal “captain’s practices” in the leadup to training camp, because the team isn’t allowed to organize anything during the offseason, but in the regular season the coaches run practice. If the head coach is sick or something, one of the assistant coaches would step in.
Apart from the on-ice part, practice involves lifting weights or otherwise working out, video review sessions, specific video or meetings focused on the power play and penalty kill, and warming up for the skate. Teams usually provide breakfast and lunch. Afternoons are then free, unless the player has some other team or charity event.
Teams usually have some kind of charitable foundation and the players will be expected to take part in a few events per season, for example visiting a children’s hospital, giving out food at Thanksgiving or gifts at Christmas. The WAGs (Wives And Girlfriends, some teams call them “better halves” which would work for Kip etc) also do charity events as a group, and players can also have their individual charity foundations or initiatives (for example, Bergeron and “Patrice’s Pals”, where sick or disabled kids got to go to a Bruins’ home game in a luxury box and meet him in person).
Practice routines for real players: 1, 2
Players are supposed to get four off days per month. The league breaks of American Thanksgiving, 24th-26th December for Christmas, and the All Star Weekend count towards the four days.
Example: Bruins schedule this season
The NHL added a bye week for each team in 2020, 5 days off either directly before or directly after the All Star Game. Most players would probably prefer not to be named for the ASG as they’d rather be resting or on a beach in Cancun. (Most players don’t have a secret hookup they are meeting at the ASG).
Most fans consider it kind of cringey and mostly for children. The NHL keeps messing with the format to make it more interesting, but usually the skills competition is on the Saturday and the game (which nobody takes seriously) on the Sunday. The NHL mascots also attend and take part in some kind of on-ice event. Most of the mascots are anthropomorphic characters played by humans in fuzzy costumes, apart from Gritty, who is an eldritch horror.
The All Star weekend gets cancelled in Olympic years, or if the NHL is arranging an international tournament themselves.
The regular season starts in October, the playoffs happen mid-April to June, and the Cup is awarded in mid-late June. The playoffs have four best-of-seven rounds, meaning you need 16 wins to get the Cup. If you win 4-0, that’s known as “sweeping” the other team. Losing three and then winning four is a "reverse sweep", winning 4-1 is a “gentleman’s sweep”.
The NHL awards and the draft happen in late June, free agency starts July 1st, and then it’s cottage time until September when training camps start. There’s usually a week for rookie camp, a week for the whole potential roster, and a week for pre-season aka exhibition games that don’t count. Rosters start with 40-50 players, and during pre-season the extra ones get sent to the AHL, or back to Europe or junior, until they are at the 23 players of the regular season roster in time for opening night.
The NHL awards are mostly named after old hockey men (and one woman - the Lord Tallon award that Ilya and Shane present in the show is the Lady Byng Memorial Trophy in real life). They are mostly voted on by the media. The Vezina (best goalie) is voted on by the general managers. There are two MVP-type awards, the Hart (voted on by the media, "player judged most valuable to his team") and the Ted Lindsay (voted on by the players, “most outstanding player”).
Voting takes place at the end of the regular season to avoid recency bias from the playoffs. The top three players in each category will attend the awards. Even though Shane would be referred to as a “Hart nominee” in 2014, he’s actually a runner-up as there’s no further voting or choice among those three players. Other players don’t normally go, as they don’t want to interrupt their offseasons, so you wouldn’t see Hayden for example at the awards.
Game day
I’m not going to really get into the rules of hockey itself, as there are a lot of great Hockey 101s around.
The general format of an evening game day is breakfast, morning skate, lunch, go back home or to the team hotel for a nap, then back to the arena. The morning skate originated when NHLers drank and partied more than they do now, for the coaches to make sure everyone was awake and not too hungover. Nowadays there’s less emphasis on it, and it’s optional for trusted veterans. The visiting team has their skate after the home team if they’re both using the home team’s practice rink.
Up until this year, the players had to arrive at the arena in suits. They will get there 2-3 hours prior to the game. They’ll tape sticks, stretch and do some other warm-up (two-touch aka sewer ball is pretty universal), get a pregame snack, and get into their gear. The arena can be colloquially referred to as "the/our barn".
Fans will wait outside the players’ entrance to the arena (or outside the practice rink at an open practice) to ask for autographs or photos. It’s actually part of the players’ CBA to not refuse reasonable fan requests while on team property. They aren’t allowed to use tobacco in the presence of fans on team property or at team events.
There’s a tradition called “money on the board”, where a player will contribute to the team social fund, or to the trainers/equipment managers, if he scores a goal or if the team wins. Often it’s because it’s a special game for him, like a milestone number of games played, he just signed an extension, or they’re playing in his home city. When Ilya’s yelling “$1000 for every goal scored!” in episode 5, he’s offering money on the board.
NHL games are ideally scheduled to start at 7PM local time. Western conference home games often get pushed back later so they can be shown on TV after an eastern conference game finishes. Early games aren’t allowed to start before noon and are known as matinees. (That’s French, Ilya).
About half an hour before the scheduled start time, the teams skate out for warm-ups. Each team gets half the rink; crossing the red line or shooting pucks into the other team’s half is a no-no. Players from opposing teams chatting across the red line (like Shane and Ilya in episode 5) is common. Players frequently have friends and acquaintances on other teams, whether they played together in the NHL, internationally, on junior teams, train together, come from the same hometown, are brothers-in-law....
During warmups, players stretch, skate around, take some gentle shots on their goalie, and greet fans at the glass (they can come down to stand by the glass as the arena isn’t full yet). Players' kids come to the glass too, or wait in the tunnel to fistbump the team as they come out of the dressing room. The players will toss pucks over the glass for a souvenir, or maybe a stick if you’re lucky. Fans bring signs like “It’s my birthday/first NHL game, can I have a puck please?” (Inappropriate signs may be confiscated by arena staff).
Some older arenas have weird tunnel configurations, like to get from the visitor’s room to the benches, you have to cross the ice, so you see the coaches shuffling across the ice in dress shoes. There will also be a family room for the partners and kids with the game on screens, and food. For more details on what it’s like to be married to an NHLer, check out Lexi LaFleur Brown, married to a former NHLer/current commentator, who is also out bi and a hockey romance author.
There’s a tradition of a “rookie lap” where a player who’s playing his first NHL game will come out first for warmups as a solo lap (helmetless, the rest of the team will pay the resulting league fine for improper gear in warmups). It originated as mild hazing, so in real life Boston doesn’t do it, because Chara, their former captain, banned hazing of rookies - they even call them “first-year players” instead.
Sometimes a slightly injured player will be a “gametime decision” and whether he will play is decided in warmups. The finalized rosters have to be reported to the league at the end of warmups before the start time. Teams can be fined for submitting an incorrect roster.
Roster report for a real MTL @ BOS game
Teams dress 20 players in an NHL game, 18 skaters and 2 goalies. In international play you can dress 22 players. If you don’t play but aren’t injured, you are referred to as a “healthy scratch”. This might be because you are a fringe player anyway, you are a young prospect who is being eased into the NHL level game, or as a punishment for breaking a team rule, like being late for practice or missing a mandatory team meeting. Scratches (healthy or otherwise) often watch the game from the press box in the arena.
Puck drop is not at the scheduled start time, especially if there is a big pre-game ceremony (championship banner raising, retiring a player’s number, a milestone ceremony for a player). Banners for Cup wins, Conference and sometimes division championships, for the Presidents' Trophy (best regular season team) hang from the arena rafters, along with any retired numbers of former players. Montréal has the most retired numbers in the league as they have a long and storied history. Boston has a lot too as they are also an Original 6 team.
Being a “starter” in hockey only refers to goalies. “Starting” for a skater literally just means they are on the ice when the game starts (they are also listed as starting in the roster sheet for the game), it does not mean they are the best player or will have the most time on ice. Even the most elite forwards play 20-22 minutes out of 60. Elite defensemen play 25-28 minutes at most. The goalie who starts the game plays the whole game, unless he gets injured or lets in so many goals that the coach swaps him for the other one. Even with teams that have clear starter/backup goalies, it’s something like a 60/22 game split, and nowadays most teams have a tandem or 1A/1B scenario with a more even split.
The national anthem is sung (both anthems if a Canadian and American team are playing, or if it’s Buffalo, honorary Canadians), and then the game finally starts. There are three periods with 20 minutes each, not counting stoppages, and intermissions are 18 minutes long. During TV timeouts in the middle of the period, the ice crew will shovel up snow (powdered ice ripped up by skates), and patch up small holes (they just pour on some water with a drinking bottle usually). During intermissions the Zambonis come out to do a full resurface of the ice, flooding it with a thin layer of water which then freezes to fresh ice. Technically some ice resurfacers are a different brand, called Olympia, but they are still referred to as a Zamboni.
During intermission players will hydrate, eat a small snack, and attend to equipment issues or minor injuries. I remember reading about a player who would remove all his gear, get in the cold tub and then gear up again, all in 18 minutes. If the team is losing, the coach may discuss a strategy change, or yell at the team if the problem seems to be effort. A captain or veteran player may yell as well.
Players with letters (captain and alternates) are the only ones officially allowed to talk to (read: argue with) officials on the ice. If a team doesn’t currently have a C, they will dress three A’s instead. Some teams have a different set of A’s for home and away. Mouthing off to an official too much can get you a penalty. Hit an official and you will get tossed from the game and possibly some supplemental discipline (fine or suspension) on top.
Officials usually refer to players by their number: “Boston number 81, two for slashing. Montréal number 24, two for roughing.” (Ilya hit Shane with his stick; Shane retaliated by shoving his hand in its sweaty glove in Ilya’s face, known as “facewashing”. Everyone must go to the box and feel shame.) The headsets referees wear to announce penalties fail to work quite frequently. The refs also use hand signals to represent the type of penalty and goal/no goal.
The head coach directs the strategy for the game. A player might instruct the rest of his line how they’re going to run a play, but that’s not necessarily the captain. The coach can also change his forward lines or defensive pairings during the game (as well as from game to game. It’s pretty fluid). For forward lines, the coach will use the centre’s name and the wingers are expected to keep up with which centre they change with.
If you make a mistake during a game and the coach doesn’t give you any more shifts, this is “being benched”. A coach can also “shorten his bench” meaning only play his better or more reliable players if the team is defending a close lead or is behind and needs to score. If a team doesn’t score, they are “shut out” and the opposing goalie gets to add a shutout to his stats.
A player leaving the bench during the game and going down the tunnel usually means he’s injured and getting looked at by the trainers. Occasionally an equipment issue that can’t be fixed at the bench for whatever reason, but I’m sure minor injuries are lied about as being equipment issues. NHL teams are secretive about injuries in case opposing players target the injury, so often all that is publicized is “upper body injury”, “lower body injury” or even "undisclosed injury”.
An urgent bathroom break will also be passed off as an equipment issue. During a TV timeout, a hurt player might go out and skate a bit to see if he is too injured to continue the game. If a player is so injured he has to be helped or stretchered off the ice, the fans applaud and both teams tap their sticks on the ice or boards. We don’t see this in Heated Rivalry because it’s Shane’s pov and he is too out of it.
The team’s athletic trainers and equipment managers are behind the bench with the coaches or waiting in the tunnel in case they are needed. The trainers can all give first aid. The home team will hire two doctors (usually an emergency medicine doctor and an orthopedic surgeon) to attend the games, as well as a dentist, and two ambulances are in attendance at the arena. (Team doctors also provide general medical practice to the players and their families).
You can sometimes hear the players yelling instructions to each other on the ice. A couple of the more unusual ones are “Dump!” (shoot the puck past the opposing defenders beyond the goal line so you can chase it in), or “Wheel, wheel!” (skate the puck around the back of the net, or just skate faster). “Wheels” can also refer to your legs.
People online made fun of Shane’s chirping in the show, but it’s not exactly genius wit in real life either.
Claude Giroux chirping Phil Kessel for drinking Pepsi and calling someone a pigeon, complete with cooing
Shawn Thornton calling someone a “milk drinker”, to the bewilderment of his own teammate
Modern quick-change skate blades are not screwed into the holders and can just pop out occasionally, leading to scenes where a player has to crawl off the ice, usually pushed or pulled by a teammate. (Fun fact, you can pop a blade in by pushing on it with your bare hand, as long as you keep pressure perpendicular to the blade and don’t slide at all. Blades are sharpened in an inverted U shape so the sharp edges are on the inside of the U, hence why you talk about a skater’s edges or edgework.)
During the regular season, overtime is 5 minutes of 3-on-3 (used to be 4-on-4, changed in 2015) and then the shootout. In the playoffs, overtime is just adding more 5-on-5 periods until someone scores. The record in this century is 5 overtime periods.
At the end of the game, the home team's media choose three stars of the game. Players from the home team will go out on the ice in turn and give the crowd a wave or raise their stick. A player from the road team might take the lap if it's his hometown or he was a long-term former player for the home team. Teams also usually show a tribute video for a long-term player's first game back, usually at the TV timeout in the first period.
There are no handshake lines in regular season NHL play, only at the end of a playoff series. The team will line up to hug/boop their goalie, and then the captain will greet them as they go down the tunnel. After the game the players cool down (stationary bikes are popular for this), give post game interviews, get in the cold tub or some will even lift weights. There will be food available at the arena as well, often in to-go format. This is where you might see a player eating wings or a pizza slice, for the sake of fast carbs/calories right after they get off the ice. Protein/recovery shakes are also popular.
Post game interviews are usually at a player's stall in the dressing room, although some teams will have a branded backdrop for interviews somewhere in the home arena. You don't usually see opposing players being interviewed at the same time - Shane and Ilya's shared media scrum was because of the All Star Game. Players chosen will be the captain or alternates, players who scored or had a fight during the game. Reporters crowding around a player in the dressing room have caused some friction is the past when they stand on the team logo in the carpet due to lack of space. This is considered disrespectful by the players, so nowadays teams are solving the problem by putting it on the ceiling instead. Some teams in the Heated Rivalry timeframe had rules about wearing a team branded shirt and cap while giving postgame interviews, others didn't/don't care if the players go tarps off. There can also be intermission interviews down on or by the ice, usually very brief and out of breath.
Many teams have a tradition of presenting an item to the player of the game. It's often a hat or a wrestling belt. Players also get a puck as a souvenir for special goals - first NHL point, first goal, hat tricks, 500th goal. The puck is switched out after every goal so for a hat trick the player will end up with three pucks. The equipment managers put tape around the edge and write the occasion on it.
Some game day routines can be very elaborate: Warm-up routines, Crosby, Eichel
International play
The IIHF holds a series of tournaments: women’s U18 and women’s World Championship, men’s U18 (held in April), men’s U20 (the World Junior Championship/International Prospect Cup, held from Boxing Day to early January), men’s World Championship (held in spring after European pro leagues are finished, NHLers can’t go unless they miss the playoffs or are knocked out in the first round).
Hockey Canada organizes a U17 Challenge (November) and another U18 event, the Hlinka-Gretzky Cup, in co-operation with the Czech and Slovak hockey federations (held in summer).
U means “under”, so the WJC/U20 team will be mostly 19 year olds, with younger players like Shane and Ilya who are exceptionally good. They could easily have met when younger than 17 in international competition, for example as 16 year olds playing U18.
Of course there’s the Olympics. The NHL doesn’t really like its players going to the Olympics as the league can’t make any money from it, which is a bone of contention between the players and the league. The NHL arranges its own international competitions like the World Cup of Hockey or Four Nations Faceoff, but as full teams of players from countries like Latvia or Slovakia don’t make the NHL, and the European leagues don’t want to interrupt their seasons to do the NHL a favour, it’s hard to make up a proper tournament bracket.
Prospects and draft
How do players make it to the NHL? They start off in youth or minor hockey (not to be confused with minor-league pro hockey), usually at a very young age. Something like started skating at 3, started playing organized games at 4 or 5, travel hockey at age 8 wouldn’t be unusual. Recreational hockey with local players is called house league, competitive hockey is organized into skill tiers of A, AA, AAA and involves travelling for games and tournaments. Competitive hockey is divided into leagues (which can cover quite a large geographical area. Shane would have played minor hockey in an Eastern Ontario league), and teams are organized by age and skill level. Leagues are registered with Hockey Canada or USA Hockey and pay fees, if they aren’t they are referred to as rogue or outlaw leagues.
The age levels used to have names like Atom, Peewee, etc (riffing on the theme of “small”), but Hockey Canada decided that it was not so great to have an age categorization called “midget” and changed it to just age labels: U7, U9, U11 and so on. I think USA Hockey did the same. If Shane is playing say U11 AAA and it’s still not a challenge to him, he might play up a level with older kids.
Junior hockey is an elite level of amateur hockey for 16-19 year old players. Minor hockey goes to U18, but players who hope for a pro or college career will go to junior earlier. Junior leagues, or at least the top ones, operate a bit like pro leagues. The three top junior leagues in Canada, known as major junior, are the Western Hockey League, Ontario Hockey League and Quebec Maritimes Junior Hockey League (collectively the Canadian Hockey League/CHL). They have drafts, trades (for 18+ players) and sell tickets.
There are lower level junior leagues known as Junior A, and Junior B. In the USA the equivalents are known as Tier II and Tier III. Most players in these levels top out at college at best, not the NHL. There’s one Tier I league in the USA called the USHL. Players in the USA may play prep school or, in Minnesota, high school hockey before going to junior.
Amateur and semi-pro hockey played by adults is called senior hockey in Canada (think Shoresy).
Junior players usually play for a team in a different city from where they live and stay with a “billet family” (a local family who volunteer to host a player during the junior season). CHL teams can draft players depending on where they live: WHL: BC, the Prairie provinces and western USA, OHL: Ontario and some upper Midwestern states, QMJHL: Quebec, Atlantic Canada and New England.
Shane is an Ottawa kid, so he would have been taken first in the OHL draft the spring of the year he turned 16, and played in the OHL in his 16, 17 and 18 year old seasons, unless he was granted exceptional status and was drafted the year he turned 15. In the book he played for Kingston. Crosby was born in Halifax and was drafted to Rimouski in the QMJHL.
There is a CHL-wide import draft each season where each team can draft two international players. A player will only be drafted in this if he’s expressed that he will come over to play in the CHL.
In Europe things are a bit different. Pro leagues own minor and junior leagues for player development and can call up their junior players to the men’s pro team from age 16. So Ilya would have started in a minor hockey team associated with a KHL team at around 8 or 9, grown up in that system and played for that KHL team before coming to the NHL. The three Moscow teams are Spartak, Dynamo and CSKA (the old Red Army team). Ovechkin’s club was Dynamo Moscow. The Russian junior league is called the MHL. So Ilya could have played for say MHC Dynamo Moscow and then been called up to the KHL Dynamo at 17. In the NHL, once a team returns a player to his junior team, he's there until the junior team's season ends, but in Europe players can be called up
The NHL draft is in sort of reverse order of the past season standings. A team deliberately trading away players to become worse and get a better draft pick is called “tanking”. To discourage tanking, the NHL has a lottery for the top pick(s). The rules have changed over the years; currently the 16 non-playoff teams are entered in two lotteries for the first and second picks, with the caveat that a team can move up a maximum of 10 spots. It’s done by a perspex ball of ping pong balls with numbers on them and overseen by Ernst and Young to check the league isn’t rigging it. Boston and Montréal were probably amongst the worst teams in the league when they drafted Ilya and Shane.
The playoff teams' draft positions depend on how far they went in the playoffs, so the Cup winner drafts last in each round. However, they are likely to have traded their picks to a bad team to get players for their playoff run. There are 7 draft rounds, but the second half of the first and the second round are a toss-up whether you get an NHL player at all, and the rest of the draft are long shots. Picks 1-15 are where you are really expecting to get a valuable player.
It’s not common to play in the NHL right after you’re drafted unless you’re really good. You will attend development and training camps with your team, but they will probably send you back to wherever they got you (junior/college/European pro leagues). NCAA players can’t sign a contract or attend training camp without losing what’s left of their college eligibility, but they can attend development camp. This is held shortly after the draft and is attended by the team's drafted prospects and usually a few players who went undrafted, but the team could potentially sign when they're done with junior or college. In the run up to training camp, groups of teams will organize rookie tournaments as part of the prospects-only part of training camp. This is usually teams that are geographically close.
Players in their early 20s who aren’t ready for the NHL will be sent to the American Hockey League (AHL), the top tier minor pro league. Each NHL team has an AHL affiliate they can assign prospects to. The team will be partly prospects and partly veterans on AHL contracts. There is a lower tier minor league, the ECHL, but it’s not common for skaters who play there to make the NHL (more common for goalies).
Trades
The trade deadline is in early March. Any player traded after that can’t play that year, so you only see picks and prospects traded after that. Busy trade times are the run up to the deadline, around the draft in late June, and around free agency day at the start of July, although players can be traded during the season up to the deadline. There’s a holiday trade freeze over Christmas and New Year as well.
When a player gets traded, his current contract remains the same, just transferred to the new team. The new team also has to pay certain relocation expenses as mandated in the CBA and supply a hotel until the player can sort out accommodation. If the player has a wife or partner, someone like Jackie who organizes WAG events will reach out to add the wife/gf to the group chat and give advice on stuff like househunting, schools, etc.
At the trade deadline, contending teams will trade for “rental” players on expiring contracts to beef up their team for the playoff run, even if they don’t have the cap space to keep him long-term and he’ll sign elsewhere in the summer (sometimes even back with his original team).
Team staff
Main coaching staff - head coach and usually 2 assistant coaches. Usually an assistant coach is in charge of coaching each special team (power play and penalty kill), and the head coach puts in place the team’s systems and general strategy. There is also a goalie coach. Video coaches prepare game tape for players to view and learn from, and watch the feeds of the game to spot an offside or something else that the head coach can use to challenge a goal as invalid.
The athletic trainers are usually qualified in sports medicine and provide first aid for injuries, help in rehab and recovery, and work with the strength and conditioning coach to help with players' workout plans.
Equipment managers look after all the sticks and skates, prepare jerseys with the correct numbers, nameplates and letters, and generally look after the gear. NHL players don’t carry their own gear bags. The equipment managers make sure all the gear is at the player’s stall in the dressing room at the arena or practice rink when he walks in. After the game, players throw their jerseys, socks etc into a big bin in the dressing room, and the equipment managers make sure everything is washed, players’ pads are dried and sanitized (gameworn hockey gear is RANK), repacked, and moved to the next place if they’re on the road.
Each player usually goes through 3 home and 3 away jerseys per season, plus one or two third jerseys. Gloves could be a new pair every game, or cycling through pairs each period because they don’t get dry fast enough even on a glove drier. Skates will be multiple new pairs in a season. Pads can be worn for years. Sidney Crosby has been wearing the same Jock of Theseus since he was about 14.
Players tip the trainers and equipment managers at the end of the season to show their appreciation of how hard they work.
A team will also employ various coaches who aren’t part of the “behind the bench” team - strength and conditioning coach(es), skating coach, other (physical) skills coaches, at least a mental skills coach or possibly a licensed sports psychologist. They also employ a dentist and various doctors in different specialties (not all full time, their main job can be at a local hospital). The team also employs nutritionists and a team of chefs to provide players with meals.
The staff who work in an actual office are known as the front office. This is split into the business side which has all the usual departments of a medium sized corporation (marketing, sales, human resources, PR, content creation, finance, etc), and hockey operations, who actually run the team. Harris in Role Model, as the social media manager, is probably part of the business side, and in a different reporting chain to the players and the rest of hockey operations.
The team owner is usually one or more old rich white guys. It’s generally considered a bad sign by fans if they are too involved in team operations as they aren’t hockey experts. The head of hockey ops is the President of Hockey Operations who sets the overall team strategy, and the General Manager handles the day to day running of the team with trades and signings (in smaller front offices this might be the same person). There are 2-4 Assistant GMs, not to be confused with Assistants to the GM, who are usually former players or someone’s nepo baby who has no qualifications but has been given a front office job anyway to learn on the job.
The NHL is still very much an old boys organization. Front offices and coaching staff are full of former players and their relatives. In the book Svetlana’s father is explicitly a former Bears goalie, and I find “Svetlana gets a job with the Bears’s front office through her dad” a plausible scenario, because a young Russian woman would find it hard to get her foot in the door of the high levels of an NHL front office without that connection, even though she’d obviously be great at it.
Each front office is different, but generally they will have departments such as Player Personnel/Scouting (finding players), Player Development (improving the prospects/players you already have), Hockey Administration (organizing schedules, travel, legalities and so on), Hockey Analytics (the stats nerds). Each department will have a Director of Whatever (or an AGM wearing that title as an extra hat) and some other staff. Scouting is split into Pro and Amateur, with some teams having a separate scouting department for European scouting. The amateur scouts themselves are geographically located near the league they scout and only fly in to the head office to plan for the draft.
Even if the team owns their arena, it’s usually a different corporate entity with its own staff. Same thing with the local broadcast company, may or may not be owned by the team, who will employ studio analysts and commentators - play-by-play commentator, who describes the events on the ice, colour commentator, adds analysis and anecdotes, rinkside reporter, who does those interviews with sweaty, out of breath players which involve much use of the phrases “get pucks in deep”, “just play our game”, “give it 110%”, punctuated with frequent sniffs, throat clearing and overuse of the word “obviously”. The interview Shane gives in French in episode 1 may be a rinkside interview. There’s also a couple of radio commentators.
When the team goes on the road, as well as the players, they bring the coaching team (including video coaches and goalie coach), trainers, equipment managers, possibly the chefs, the TV commentating team and maybe a few front office people like a social media creator or team writer, or maybe a GM or AGM who wants to scout a player or talk to another GM in person. Lots of people for an opposing player who’s sneaking into the team hotel to bump into in the elevator!
Some beat reporters follow the team on the road, but they fly commercial as they are employed by a media organization, not the team.
Contracts and Salary Cap
The players' union is called the NHLPA, presumably the MLHPA in the show. They negotiate a Collective Bargaining Agreement which the league and players have to abide by. It lays out all the legal obligations like pensions, health care, salary structure which the league has to fulfill, and what a Standard Player Contract looks like.
The CBA expires every so often and needs to be re-negotiated between the PA and the league. If they can’t come to an agreement in time, the owners won’t schedule games and there will be a work stoppage called a lockout. The 2005-06 season and the first half of the 2012-13 season were lost to lockouts. The full season lockout was right before Crosby and Ovechkin’s rookie seasons, so might have happened in 2009-10 in the GCU instead, hence Shane and Ilya having their rookie seasons at age 19 instead of 18.
The NHL is currently bound by the 2013 CBA, plus minor tweaks in 2020 and 2025 called a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU). The latest MOU expires in 2030.
CBA and subsequent MOUs (very heavy going unless you are a lawyer)
Some interesting small details in the CBA
NHL contracts are very standardized; the CBA includes a fill-in-the-blanks template called a Standard Player Contract. There are parameters which vary like term, salary each year, movement clauses, and signing bonuses, but there are rules about each of these. The Average Annual Value of the contract is what counts against the salary cap, and is what it says on the label, total value of the contract divided by the term. Standard contracts can’t have performance bonuses, but entry-level contracts and some other types can.
There is a minimum salary of about 750K USD in the Heated Rivalry era (increases of this over time are in the CBA), and a maximum salary of 20% of the salary cap. Even the best players in the league get significantly below the max salary, as they want to leave money on the table to allow the front office to build a winning team around them. Connor McDavid is the current best player in the world and has a $12 million contract, even though he provides more than x12 the value to his team of a typical $1 million salary veteran player. A player may also give a “hometown discount” if he’s returning to his (or his partner’s) actual home, or if he’s been with his team for so long he considers it home.
The NHL brought in a maximum term of 7 years in 2013 (if extending with the team you were signed with as of the last trade deadline, it’s 8 years). This is going down to 6 years (7 if extending) as of 2026. You can extend on a multi-year contract from July 1st of the last year of your contract, and from January 1st of a one-year contract.
If your contract expires when you are under a certain age or experience (age 27 as of July 1st, or 7 years experience in the league), you are a Restricted Free Agent and can only sign with your own team, or another team if they sign you to an “offer sheet”. Your original team can either match the terms of the offer sheet, or receive draft picks from the offer sheeting team in compensation. Offer sheets are rare in the NHL, about a dozen since 2005. If you are older or more experienced, you are an Unrestricted Free Agent and can sign wherever. Shane and Ilya reach UFA status as of July 1st, 2017, after seven years in the league, so Ilya can leave Boston when his contract expires the following summer.
Young players sign a contract called an Entry-Level Contract. It has a fixed salary ($900K at the time Ilya and Shane were rookies), is eligible for performance bonuses if the players reaches certain stats or wins a major league award, and the term depends on the age when signed. For Shane and Ilya it's three years.
Ilya and Shane’s ELCs started in 2010, and expired in 2013. We know from Heated Rivalry that Ilya then signs a 5-year contract expiring in 2018, and from The Long Game that Shane signs an 8-year contract expiring in 2021. Shane’s contract probably has a higher salary than Ilya’s because it buys three more UFA years in his prime. In 2013 a plausible AAV for an elite player was about $8-9 million (all Crosby’s contracts have an AAV of 8.7 million because he is superstitious about 87, but Ovechkin was making $9.5 million). By 2018 an elite player would have an AAV of $11-12 million (Connor McDavid signed for $12 million that year). In the real world covid then caused a near-flat cap for five years, so there’s still only a couple of players with an AAV of more than $12 million, but in the GCU there’s no covid so the cap is probably higher.
Only UFA years of a contract can have movement clauses. There’s a No Movement Clause (can’t be sent to the minors without consent), full No Trade Clause (can’t be traded without consent) and partial NTC (can list a certain number of teams they can be traded to, or block trades to a certain number of teams. The list is submitted to their team each offseason). Elite players like Ilya and Shane will likely have a NMC and full NTC, because of their higher negotiating power.
Some articles on NHL contracts if you want to go deeper: Contracts 101, Standard Player Contracts, bonuses
Almost every NHL player has an agent (not manager) who negotiates with their team on their behalf, deals with trade requests if necessary, and handles endorsements for players who don’t have a Yuna (I assume she negotiated a smaller agent’s cut of Shane’s endorsements when he signed with his agent). The agent is part of an agency, like CAA’s sports division, which also employs accountants, lawyers, PR people etc who the player also has access to through their agent. The most endorsement opportunities are available to elite players, especially playing in Canada or a "hockey town" in the northern USA. Like Sidney Crosby, Shane probably had his initial endorsements several years before being drafted.
Both player agents and team management are majority white men. Shane and Ilya's agent in The Long Game is a woman with an Arabic name and it's likely she's a first as an NHLPA-registered agent for both. The real life first female NHL player agent started her career in 2016.
Free agency day is July 1st, Canada Day. Contracts which are expiring that year will expire at noon EST. Negotiating with a pending free agent without permission of the team who he’s still under contract with is called tampering and can be punished by the league. However, there are many multi-million-dollar contracts announced at 12:10 on July 1st, showing that the league winks at tampering unless it’s blatant. Everyone wants to get the wheeling and dealing over with so they can go to the cottage! Late July and August is the dead time for NHL news.
The NHL salary cap is very strict, more so than the NFL or NBA. There’s no luxury tax, nobody ever used deferred salary much and they’re getting rid of it in 2026 anyway. Once a team signs a player to a contract, they’re kind of stuck with it unless they trade him or buy out the contract. Generally long contracts signed by players in their early twenties turn out to be good value for the team as they’re still getting better when it’s signed. Long contracts signed by players aged 30 or more are generally bad for the team as the player is well in decline by the end of it, apart from a few elite players with unusual longevity like Crosby and Bergeron (who were signed at less than their original market value anyway).
The players get 50% of Hockey Related Revenue. The league projects the revenue for the upcoming years, and applies some formula where it’s divided in half, some is taken off for non-salary benefits, and then divided by the number of teams to get the upper salary cap for a team that year. If more than 50% is paid out to the players, they have to pay the owners back out of an escrow account where some of their salary is held during the season. If it’s less than 50% the owners have to pay the players the shortfall. The players hate escrow so it’s best if the cap/projected revenue reflects the real revenue as accurately as possible. There is also a salary floor to ensure competitive balance. If a team went above the cap or below the floor the league would punish them (probably losing draft picks), but it’s never happened.
Contracts are guaranteed. You can’t restructure a contract and there are no option years. If a guy is performing badly, a team cannot cut him. They can send him to the minors, which will reduce his cap hit by about 1 million USD, or there is a window in the summer where they can buy out the contract at two-thirds (or one-third if under 25), spread out over twice the term.
Puckpedia is the most comprehensive database of current and historical player contract data, agent client lists, FAQs on contract and salary cap.
If a player gets injured, he can be put into IR status (injured reserve, out for a minimum of 7 days), which gives the team an extra roster spot to call up a replacement. If he is more injured, they put him in LTIR status (Long Term Injured Reserve, minimum of 24 days out and 10 games missed), which gives the roster spot plus (some) salary cap relief. If a player suffers a career-ending injury, the team just keeps putting him on LTIR until the contract expires so he keeps being paid. This is a very simplified explanation of LTIR. If a player needs to leave the team for personal reasons, like Ilya going to Russia for his father’s funeral, he is designated as Non-Roster, which frees up a roster slot for a temporary replacement the same way IR does.
Players get a paycheck biweekly and also get a per diem for meals and other expenses when on the road. The teams provide a lot of meals too. They do not get paid in the offseason or get paid a salary during the playoffs (there are some league-provided playoff bonuses), so they need to budget for that.
Diet/nutrition
Pro hockey players eat a lot! They can burn the entire daily calorie allocation for a sedentary adult male just in the game alone. They need lots of protein, vegetables for vitamins and other nutrients, healthy fats, and also lots of carbohydrates around games because they just burn it straight off again with the exertion, and they need easily available fuel.
Shane is still eating a lot of food on his performance diet, it’s just quite boring. His macrobiotic diet in the show can’t be extremely strict either, because it wouldn’t have enough protein (we also see him eating salmon, and burgers in the offseason), although some NHL players do eat mainly plant-based diets. This is a quote from Cale Makar’s nutritionist: “It's all gluten-free, soy-free and mostly dairy-free, with the exception of eating grass-fed butter and ghee sometimes. It's refined-sugar-free and mostly grain-free. They'll have white rice occasionally. But the focus is on high-quality organic grass-fed proteins. Starchy veggies and fruits are the carbohydrate sources.” Nathan Mackinnon famously tried to switch the whole team to eating chickpea pasta. There’s one player who eats raw liver, which Ilya and Shane would agree is a nope. So there’s some variation in weird diets.
In the book Shane’s listed stats are 5’10” and 200lb (although Ilya is skeptical), so he’s pretty sturdy. The average NHL forward is 6’1” and about 200lbs. Defensemen are a bit bigger, and goalies are usually tall and lanky. Connor and Hudson aren’t too far off average; they’re both taller than book Shane and noticeably smaller than book Ilya.
How the Bruins chefs feed the team
Bruins’ nutritionist working with young prospects, who have to eat even more than the adults as they're trying to bulk up to their man strength.
Improving nutrition/performance diets - hi, Shane! Penguins, Avalanche.
And still some fast food/cheat meals - Hi, Ilya! Yes, NHL players do eat fast food sometimes - particularly right after a game - and cheat on their diets.
Eating out on the road is usually as a team or as a group. Steakhouses, Italian and sushi are popular.
Training
Training during the season is mostly maintainance/trying to keep weight on. At the end of the season, players will have lost a lot of muscle and often are injured to some degree, especially if they went deep in the playoffs.
In the offseason a player will rest and rehab first, then start off-ice training, and get back on the ice late in the offseason. A group of high-level amateur (college/junior), minor pro and NHL players staying at their summer homes will get together to skate in the late offseason. As the NHLers join in, the lower level players will drop out of the group to make room. So it’s plausible that Shane would have skated during summers with some of the Ottawa Centaurs, if they live in the city year-round!
Teams will provide trainers, strength and conditioning coaches, skills coaches, nutritionists and chefs but top players can hire their own, especially during the offseason when they are away from their team city. Their team will usually give them a plan of what to work on during the off-season, especially as a young player. Teams can’t force players to stay in the team city during the offseason but some do stay, or have their main home there.
A group of NHLers can also do some training together, for example BioSteel camp (sponsored by a now-defunct energy drink company), which was a group of high-level NHL players working with a famous strength and conditioning coach.
Living situations and real estate
As the least popular and least well paid of the major leagues, NHL players don’t really live like major celebrities. In most USA cities, they can go out without being bothered too much by fans. In southern USA cities, they can be totally anonymous. Many players prefer to play for teams in the southern USA because of the low media attention and the warm weather in winter.
Given New Yorkers, Scott Hunter is probably more likely to get yelled at for sprinting on the sidewalk than asked for his autograph. Actual NY Rangers players travel to the arena on the subway, actual Bruins players walk through the North End to the arena, even Willie Nylander has been spotted travelling to games on the subway in Toronto. The kids at the aquarium recognizing Shane but not Hayden is pretty plausible.
Shane being in the mainstream gossip sites was down to Rose’s fame. Ilya is not going to show up on TMZ rolling out of the club unless 1) he picks up a girl who’s more famous than he is or 2) he gets arrested. David probably learned of Ilya’s reputation either through word of mouth (pro hockey is a small world), or Yuna doing opposition research via local Boston fan blogs/media complaining that Ilya parties too much.
If Shane is cyber-stalking photos of Ilya with girls, it's likely to be either via teammates’s social media, or a site run by and for women who want to hook up with hockey players. In hockey culture there is unfortunately a strong distinction between “girls you hook up with” and “girls you date/marry”. “Puck bunny” and similar terms are not compliments. I could see Shane using the term in a “performing toxic masculinity” way.
In the show, if Ilya’s teammates know about Svetlana they probably assume she’s his off-again-on-again girlfriend and thus Category 2, and Ilya isn’t going to mention anything that would make them think of her as Category 1, ie that she's not exclusive to him. Ilya hooking up with other women isn’t going to affect how they think of Svetlana; they’d probably just feel sorry for her.
Players usually live either close to the arena (usually a condo or townhouse), or close to the practice arena (usually outside the city). Some teams have their practice rink as part of the arena complex (New Jersey), some teams have both the arena and the rink out in the sticks (Ottawa), and Vancouver doesn’t even have a permanent practice rink. Article about NY metro teams, but gives the general vibe.
Shane having a condo near the arena in Heated Rivalry and then moving to a house near the practice rink in The Long Game is pretty common - move out to the suburbs when you get a partner/dog! Real Boston players tend to live in condos or townhouses in Boston proper even when they have a family, so Ilya’s house in the show would be unusual, especially for a young, single guy.
In Boston, it would be very unlikely to find a new house that size in a setting with so many trees anywhere inside route 128/I-95. Boston itself is small and very urban, and its inner-ring suburbs are old and dense.
The Bruins' current practice facility, Warrior Ice Arena, is alongside the Pike in the neighbourhood of Brighton. Their old practice rink during most of the Heated Rivalry timeframe was in Wilmington in the northern suburbs (Ristuccia Memorial Arena). If we assume the rink is Warrior, Ilya probably lives in one of the tony MetroWest towns close to the Pike, likely in the town of Weston or nearby.
If it’s Ristuccia, it would be somewhere close to I-93. Andover is most likely, it’s very wealthy and some of the Bruins did live there back in the day.
So Ilya’s house is probably 30-40 minutes from TD Garden with no traffic. Not so handy for a post-game or pre-game hookup, could explain why Shane has never been there before tuna melts. In the book he has a penthouse somewhere closer to the arena. It could be in the North End, especially the waterfront, or maybe Downtown (the Downton area is a pretty dead place to live though).
Rachel was probably imagining a glass box, but in Boston real estate “penthouse” is about as likely to be the top floor(s) of an old Federalist or Victorian house in Beacon Hill or Back Bay.
Shane is a lot easier because the book specifies! His condo is in Westmount, the hookup building is in the Plateau, and he eventually buys a house near the practice rink in Brossard.
Most players don’t stay in their team’s city during the summers. There are too many Metros players watching Ilya winning the Cup to be realistic. Locker room clearout and the last media availability day is a couple of days after a team gets knocked out of the playoffs, and players will leave town shortly after that for R&R. Even if their main home is in Montréal, they would head to the cottage or take a trip. Older veterans with school-aged children would stay until the end of the semester, and if a player is getting surgery he could get it in the team city. JJ is Quebecois and Hayden played junior in Drummondville in the book, so he could plausibly be an anglophone Montrealer like Jacob Tierney. The show moved Shane’s cottage from Ontario to Lanaudière which is actually closer to Montréal than Ottawa, so he could have been at the cottage and come back.
Normally rookies as young as Shane and Ilya won’t get their own place right away, but will live with a veteran player for a season or two to learn by example what the professional hockey life involves. The book mentions it’s unusual for Shane to live on his own as a rookie. It would be even more so for Ilya with the culture shock factor, so lack of budget strikes again with Ilya living in the same place from rookie year to tuna melt. Perhaps Ilya did live with a veteran teammate who was traded, and he just kept living in his house, and by 2016 he’s still renting it from the other player or has bought it off him.
Older rookies or AHL bubble players live either in a long-stay hotel or a team-owned apartment. During development or training camp, there will be a number of them at the same hotel.