With Digital Arts’ hockey franchise now in its fourth decade of existence, NHL 23 will ship two milestones for the collection: Its cowl options Trevor Zegras of the Anaheim Geese and Sarah Nurse of the Canadian girls’s nationwide crew, marking the primary time in EA Sports activities NHL historical past {that a} girl has appeared on the quilt of a recreation, and the primary time that two folks have shared the stage.
For years now, EA has been placing a number of the NHL’s youngest stars on the field, like Auston Matthews (twice), P.Okay. Subban, and Connor McDavid. Zegras, 21, is even earlier in his profession than these gamers have been once they grew to become EA Sports activities NHL cowl athletes. However he’s already beginning to put collectively a formidable resume, having completed second within the voting for the Calder Trophy (the NHL’s rookie of the 12 months award) with 61 factors — 23 targets and 38 assists — in 75 video games final season.
As for Nurse, 27, she made a reputation for herself on the world’s greatest hockey stage on the Winter Olympics in Beijing earlier this 12 months. Setting Olympic information for many factors (18) and most assists (13) in a single girls’s hockey event, Nurse helped Workforce Canada seize a gold medal and avenge the squad’s shootout loss to the Individuals 4 years earlier. Nurse, who’s biracial, additionally grew to become the primary Black girl to win an Olympic gold medal in hockey.
With the NHL at all times trying to find younger, marketable stars, {and professional} girls’s hockey leagues working to achieve a foothold, Zegras and Nurse are wise selections for NHL 23’s cowl. In their very own means, every of them represents a contemporary kind of athlete who’s altering the face of hockey.
The buttoned-up, team-first hockey tradition of outdated is slowly giving method to occasions the place gamers really feel snug sharing their character and their off-ice passions. Positive, you’ll nonetheless see loads of boring athlete interviews stuffed with cliches about “getting pucks in deep” and “getting again to our recreation.” However on social media, NHL groups at the moment are posting images of their stars arriving to recreation day dressed to the nines, and The Athletic took the subsequent logical step final season: doing energy rankings of NHL model icons.
Nurse shares loads of photos in hockey gear together with her 53,000-plus followers on Instagram, however she additionally posts sponsored trend photograph shoots and photographs of her not too long ago acquired Pomeranian, Romeo. “I’m any person that, once I go away the rink, it stays on the rink,” stated Nurse. “And I really like so many different issues. I’m in all probability, like, one of the crucial untraditional girls’s hockey gamers you’d ever meet. Like, I really like hair and make-up and trend, and various things like that.”
On the planet of hockey, calling consideration to your self — whether or not on or off the ice — rubs some the incorrect means. Should you observe the game in any respect, you’ve in all probability seen clips of Zegras’ unimaginable performs, like scoring lacrosse-style targets in opposition to the Montreal Canadiens and Arizona Coyotes (or faking the identical transfer and as an alternative flipping the puck over the online for a teammate to bat it in).
After months of grumbling across the NHL about Zegras’ show-stopping play, his crew’s common supervisor, Pat Verbeek, defended him in an interview with the media, saying, “That is simply one other unreal ability set and artistic method to rating targets.” Nonetheless, Verbeek acknowledged that if somebody had finished what Zegras did when he himself was within the league — Verbeek performed from 1982-2002, notching greater than 1,000 factors — it might have been “frowned upon,” and regarded exhibiting up an opponent by “hot-dogging.”
“At any time when I watched hockey, I’d at all times simply take into consideration different ways in which you might get the puck to the place you need it to go,” Zegras stated of the origins of his taking part in model, in an interview with EA that the writer supplied to the media. “The best way I’m wired is, like, if I see a play and I feel I could make it, I’m going to strive.”
Nurse counts herself amongst Zegras’ rising legion of followers.
“I feel that’s why folks resonate with [players like Zegras], is as a result of they’re unapologetically themselves, they’re real, and so they’re keen to precise themselves,” Nurse instructed Polygon. “And I feel that that’s big, and that’s crucial to our recreation.”
Nurse was talking usually about rising the game of hockey, however she’s centered on rising girls’s hockey particularly. Though she performed a starring position on Workforce Canada in Beijing, Nurse doesn’t have a membership of her personal in the intervening time.
“there have been girls’s hockey gamers once I was rising up — however I by no means noticed them, proper?”
Whereas a fledgling girls’s professional league does exist — the Premier Hockey Federation, previously often known as the Nationwide Girls’s Hockey League — many of the high girls’s gamers, together with Nurse, have allied themselves with the Skilled Girls’s Hockey Gamers Affiliation and are holding out for one thing totally different. The PWHPA is a company that’s working to create a sustainable girls’s hockey league in North America that may pay gamers because the professionals they’re; one of many group’s details of rivalry with the PHF is that it believes the prevailing league doesn’t assist gamers sufficiently to permit them to be year-round professional athletes.
Clearly, Nurse’s look on the quilt of NHL 23 isn’t going to will a brand new league into existence by itself. However these sorts of issues could make a distinction in elevating consciousness and forming a base of assist that may pay dividends down the road.
“Visibility is likely one of the most vital issues with regards to illustration,” stated Nurse. “As a result of I do know, for me personally, there have been girls’s hockey gamers once I was rising up — however I by no means noticed them, proper? They weren’t seen. And so what EA is admittedly doing right here is admittedly placing girls on a platform and saying girls have worth in our recreation. Which I feel is essential — not just for little ladies to acknowledge their worth, but in addition for the little boys to have the ability to see girls in positions of energy and ladies in sports activities, and make it regular.”
