NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman has made his feelings on the new hit TV show, “Heated Rivalry,” crystal clear, binge-watching for an entire night. “Heated Rivalry” is a Canadian sports romance series following two elite hockey players, Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov, whose fierce on-ice rivalry hides a secret relationship.<\/p>\n
The show has been praised for its emotional depth and lead chemistry and has already been renewed for a second season, with rave reviews. “Heated Rivalry” has a 9\/10 score on IMDb and 99% on Rotten Tomatoes, underscoring its early success and demand for a second season.<\/p>\n
“Heated Rivalry” has now spread to Ice Hockey’s premier league, the NHL, with its Commissioner, Bettman, giving the show his stamp of approval. Bettman revealed that he watched all six episodes in one sitting.<\/p>\n
“I’ve watched all six episodes. I binged it in one night,” NHL commissioner Gary Bettman told reporters. “I thought the storyline was very compelling and a lot of fun, because I could (see) where they were picking at things that we had in the past, whether it was (Olympics) in Sochi or the All-Star Game in Tampa. It was very well done.”<\/p>\n
Homophobia in sports has been a hot topic in recent years across several prominent leagues. Such discussions have taken place in tennis, football, basketball, and other prominent disciplines. Hockey is no different.<\/p>\n
Though Bettman emphasized that the league had already “meaningfully embraced” the LGBTQ+ community, highlighting team-hosted Pride Nights and its collaboration with You Can Play, an organization dedicated to fostering LGBTQ+ inclusion in sports.<\/p>\n
“I think it’s a wonderful story. The content, particularly for young people, might be a little spicy. And so you have to balance that out in terms of how you embrace (the show),” Bettman said.<\/p>\n
“There are a lot of things about the game that we think are driving more and more people to the game, and I do believe ‘Heated Rivalry’ is one of those things,” he added.<\/p>\n
Bettman’s enthusiasm for the show also comes two years on from a controversial ban on Pride-themed jerseys and tapes worn during warmups and games. All 32 teams, Bettman said, have scheduled Pride nights, but the wider ban was questioned.<\/p>\n
“It wasn’t about Pride jerseys or Pride tape,” he said. “It was about the fact of bringing things into the game that might not be embraced by the players wearing the jerseys. If some players don’t embrace the cause, whatever it is, then you create a distraction that doesn’t fulfill the purpose.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman has made his feelings on the new hit TV show, “Heated Rivalry,” crystal clear,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":413440,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[66],"tags":[198224,385,198223,99],"class_list":{"0":"post-413439","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-nhl","8":"tag-ice-hockey-section","9":"tag-nhl","10":"tag-nhl-section","11":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/413439","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=413439"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/413439\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/413440"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=413439"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=413439"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=413439"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}