In October 2024, a few months before Heated Rivalry was greenlit by studio producers in Canada, Amazon Prime Video announced that it was adapting the popular hockey romance book series Off Campus. Set at a fictional Ivy League school called “Briar University,” author Elle Kennedy's series follows four rakish men’s hockey players on the Briar U team as they meet the women who convince them to commit to a relationship.
With Amazon Prime Video already riding a wave of romance show success with The Summer I Turned Pretty, optioning Kennedy’s Off Campus made sense. Around 2023, hockey romance, a niche subset of the romance genre, began to surge in popularity on BookTok. Romance readers everywhere became obsessed—some to the point that they started showing up to NHL games and borderline sexually harassing players during warmups. It seemed like every other day, some romance imprint was announcing yet another hockey romance novel, often taking gleeful advantage of the punny titling opportunities offered by the word “puck.” Kennedy was one of the early pioneers of hockey romance, publishing the first book in the series, The Deal, in 2015. The series has sold millions of copies, and like Netflix’s Bridgerton, each book focuses on a different hockey player on the Briar team, which makes for an easy book-per-season cadence.
I read The Deal in high school, and learned that Kennedy’s writing has all the markers of a 2010s heterosexual romance that leaves you feeling like you might have sent the women’s rights movement back by a decade. She also doesn’t seem to have a good grasp of how and when NHL prospects are drafted, which irked me. Garrett Graham, the main love interest in The Deal, is hailed as a top college player and he spends a lot of time thinking about how he’ll declare for the draft after his senior year of college—which doesn’t make sense because he would lose draft eligibility by age 20.
Admittedly, I’m probably alone in looking to a romance series for details about entry-level contracts and player development pipelines. Kennedy and others who have shaped the genre aren't interested in reality, but in the fantasy of what they think a hockey player is like.
If anything, The Deal is less of a hockey romance and more of a bad boy romance. The original summary advertises it as such (Graham is referred to as “the college bad boy”). The better descriptor here might be fuckboy—Kennedy frames Graham and his best friends as boys who are busy sleeping through the entire college campus and uninterested in committing themselves to a relationship.
Unlike Crave’s Heated Rivalry, the fantasy of Off Campus is a little different. While Heated Rivalry asks you to imagine what the NHL would be like if its star players were in gay relationships, Off Campus has a messier, harder sell: it requires you to believe that Kennedy’s cast of playboy puck handlers can be both sexy, promiscuous, frat-affiliated college athletes and good guys that respect women.
The Off Campus creators try to accomplish this in a couple of ways. One of Kennedy’s plot points that aged poorly, a so-called “hands-off” rule—no guy at school is allowed to touch Hannah or Graham will “kick their asses”—that Book-Graham puts into effect after his third-act breakup with Hannah Wells, the female love interest, gets the axe. The guys have conversations about how the one thing really great sex requires is consent. Off Campus also takes a stab at more serious issues. Graham is a survivor of domestic violence, Hannah is a survivor of sexual assault, and the show grapples with what it means to find your own identity and autonomy as a survivor.
They’ve also tried to update the show in other respects. Elle Kennedy’s original series suffered from a severe lack of diversity, so much so that when she occasionally tried to include characters of color, she did so in such a racist way that one of those scenes got retconned in later editions. In comparison, a few of the main leads are sort of racially ambiguous. And to the horror of some of the book fans, they cast actress Mika Abdalla, a brunette, to play a character who is blonde in the books. The show also features a few queer characters, all in sidekick roles. One of the hockey players now has a nonbinary sibling, Jules, who features in most episodes.
In the same breath, though, Off Campus still tries to grip onto the hockey fuck boy of it all, in a full embrace of a type of culture that seems incompatible with respecting women. The term “puck bunny” is thrown around casually and uncritically. At one point, Graham refers to the fan bus as the “puck bunny bus,” with little pushback from any other character. The so-called puck bunnies even sit together in a section at the games. In fact, “puck bunny” is used so much that Jimmy Fallon asked the Off Campus leads to define it during the guest segment.
“Puck bunnies are the women that support the team,” Belmont Carmeli, who plays Graham, says, which is such a gross oversimplification of a term that has exclusively been used to demean female fans of hockey as nothing more than women who want to sleep with the players.
Even the crumbs of woke in the show can’t deliver on the premise of a healthier hockey culture. Besides running a gossip account about the team, Jules, the nonbinary sibling character, also does the worst play-by-plays I’ve ever heard via Instagram livestreams at every game. Not only does this seem like a violation of broadcasting rights, but Jules delivers some of the most misogynistic and homophobic lines in the whole show. During one of the games, Jules has this to say when the team improves after a rough first period: “Okay, Briar, looks like we’ve decided to get off our knees and stop sucking.”
Perhaps the show writers kept in these lines because they thought it made the show more true to life. The specter of hockey’s toxic culture already lingers over Off Campus in several ways. Graham, who was physically abused by his NHL superstar father, worries about his own capacity to hurt others. Hannah was sexually assaulted by a hockey player who faced no consequences for his actions. The show, however, never bothers to confront this connection. Its inability to address its own mistreatment of female hockey fans ends up sanitizing the uglier parts of hockey culture, as if terms like “puck bunny” could be positively reclaimed, or sexist play-by-play language could be excused by having a gender-diverse character deliver the line.
Kennedy, and the show writers, want to have it both ways: the danger of a hockey bad boy with the veneer of female empowerment. But for anyone remotely familiar with the reality of the sport, this fantasy falls apart under the weight of its own contradictions.
Issues like sexism, racism, homophobia, and sexual assault remain so pervasive in hockey culture, and the last few years have proven that the NHL and its affiliate leagues will not take lead on addressing those issues. They’ll sign players who racistly assaulted a classmate or were convicted of rape, ban pride tape, and then sheepishly walk back those decisions after backlash.
As the Stanley Cup Playoffs swung into motion last week, it has been hard to ignore that both franchises involved have signed players who were charged and acquitted in the Hockey Canada 2018 World Juniors sexual assault trials. Carolina Hurricanes fans might have chanted “No means no” at Las Vegas Golden Knight goalie Carter Hart, but the Hurricanes notably signed Cal Foote, another player involved in the World Juniors trial, to their AHL affiliate in December.
It makes seeing Off Campus put out merchandise like this “I Heart Hockey Boys” tank top feel all the more objectifying and naive. Between the fake dating and secret relationships, love songs sung over arena intercoms, and a ridiculous shirtless workout montage, Off Campus is ultimately haunted by the hockey culture it can’t—or won’t—shake.
