Reactions to the lads’s crew’s habits additionally got here in thick and quick on social media because the gamers and their respective NHL groups had been bombarded with damaging feedback on-line. Some followers felt that Quinn Hughes, who performs for the Minnesota Wild, ought to really feel significantly ashamed, on condition that the state has been such a visual goal for Trump’s ICE crackdown. A defaced Hughes jersey was later left outdoors the Hockey Corridor of Fame in Toronto, the place it was pictured scrawled with such feedback as “bootlicker” and “fascist cuck.”
After the lads’s crew, with a number of exceptions, certainly attended Trump’s State of the Union and had been seen carrying MAGA merch, the backlash continued throughout social media. It appeared that the brand new followers the NHL had picked up following the success of Heated Rivarly – reportedly boosting ticket gross sales by as a lot as 20% – had been additionally turning into swiftly disillusioned by the game. At this level, it was clear that the controversy wasn’t simply going to go away.
Within the midst of this PR nightmare, Storrie stepped in, delivering some enjoyable jokes about his street to stardom throughout his opening SNL monologue earlier than bringing the Hughes brothers onstage carrying their Crew USA jerseys and gold medals. The group clapped the lads’s entrance earlier than Storrie made some gags in regards to the content material of Heated Rivalry. The brothers admitted they hadn’t seen the present. That’s when Storrie introduced on U.S. ladies’s hockey captain Knight and her teammate, Megan Keller, to large applause from the viewers. “It was gonna be simply us, however we thought we’d invite the fellows too,” Knight mentioned pointedly, earlier than Keller added, “We thought we’d give them just a little second to shine,” whereas the Hughes brothers stood smiling because the butt of the joke.
It was no shock to see NBC working this stage of PR injury management. In spite of everything, each the Olympics and SNL are NBC properties, however some really feel that Storrie, Knight, and Keller ought to by no means have been hijacked as PR puppets for the lads’s crew after they had been simply as able to addressing the controversy themselves and taking some accountability for it. However, the PR coup appears to have inevitably labored for probably the most half, with the gamers’ joint look alongside Storrie described as “therapeutic” and “cathartic” for viewers.
“A increase to whoever helped thread this PR needle as a result of this managed to not be agonising regardless of actually all the pieces pointing in that route,” famous a consumer on r/hockey. “Storrie and Knight dealt with this with immense grace.” One other replied with “Achieved extra with a 3-minute skit than the entire NHL has managed in every week.”
For the second time in six months, the NHL owes Connor Storrie. Massive time.
