You could hear the bottles being popped as the clock struck five on the Friday of Labor Day Weekend at the NHL Network studios in Secaucus, NJ. Not only was this the last long weekend before things around the league ramp up in September, but it was a celebration of another successful August.
While casual sports fans had their attention on baseball, the WNBA, college football starting, or NFL training camps — or, doing the unthinkable and spending time outside, ugh — the hockey-centric sickos had a month of nothing. Or so they thought.
Despite August being known as the month when front offices are closed around the NHL as general managers and other officials retreat to the cottage, the flagship network of the league had to do something to keep its fans engaged.
Sure, they could replay some key games from the prior season and Stanley Cup Playoffs, which they did throughout the entire summer. But that would only hold the attention of so many fans, and there was only so much they could do on social media with it.
But the NHL Network had other plans. It’s nothing new, as they’ve instituted something like it on an annual basis for the last decade-plus, but it always gets the fans going.
“We know that August is a slow month for our league, but we have to keep the conversation going among our diehard fans,” said NHL Network executive Gage Mint Bate. “Everyone loves rankings and lists, so we’ve handfed the 24/7, 365 hockey fans plenty to talk about throughout the dog days of summer.”
Bate knows how fans operate. They want to be able to have discussions and arguments over whatever they can find to prove that they know the most about the game and that their opinion is always right.
“Everyone thinks they know everything about everything,” Bate continued. “We could offer up some logical rankings, or we could stir the pot a bit.”
NHL Network did just that.
But they didn’t just do it with overall rankings of the top players in the NHL. Instead, they broke it down as granularly as they could with rankings by position.
And the fans, bloggers, and content creators ate it up.
The thing about rankings is that they allow for multiple waves of content. There’s the initial blog, which simply repeats what the list said, with that specific team’s player(s) being on or off the list. And then, depending on the situation, there can be content created on either side of the argument. Should this player have been included, or ranked higher if they were included? Did they deserve to make the rankings at all?
Even if a specific team didn’t have a player in the top 20 at a position, the sickos could react to players from their rivals being ranked too highly.
NHL Network has cornered the market on the top 20 players at each position, but there are plenty of other angles out there for other outlets to tackle. And tackle they have.
Other popular blogs around the interwebs have also leaned into the rankings and lists to create engagement throughout the slog of August.
“There’s only so much you can talk about after a team’s offseason is complete. August allows us to dive into some of the prospects who have been drafted, said R. Gument of The Athletic. “No one truly knows how these players will perform when — or if — they reach the NHL. It’s perfect.”
Arguing about prospects is one of the favorite pastimes of hockey folk. Who is going to be the next star? Did their favorite team make mistakes at the draft? No one truly knows, at least not yet.
We here at Broad Street Hockey ate it up with not one, not two, but three different articles reacting to prospect rankings.
Some sites take that a step further, predicting the top players in the league in a number of years. This also opens up a world of opportunities for bloggers to react to their team’s players being included or left off the list.
“Who knows what’s going to happen in five years? We could all be dead,” said Daily Faceoff’s Les Tickle. “Let’s create some buzz while we can.”
All in all, August was another month of thinking outside the box to give hockey fans something to get mad about.
“I can’t feed my family with the news of AHL veterans signing overseas,” said one anonymous blogger. “These rankings, though? My kids can each enjoy their own happy meal rather than splitting it in four.”
Hell, we even turned a few microstats into a blog praising multiple third-pairing defensemen.
“Everyone always gets mad at us for not caring about the fans,” said NHL commissioner Gary Bettman. “Who’s laughing now?”
