No. Heated Rivalry is fiction, adapted from Rachel Reid’s 2019 romance novel of the same name. Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov are invented characters, and they play in an invented league. What is real is the pressure the books were written around, because the questions the series raises about hockey culture were live long before anyone optioned it.
The novel, the network and the people who made it
| Question | Answer |
|---|---|
| Based on a true story? | No |
| Based on a book? | Yes, Heated Rivalry by Rachel Reid, published March 25, 2019 |
| Created by | Jacob Tierney |
| Leads | Hudson Williams, Connor Storrie |
| Premiere | November 28, 2025, Crave in Canada and HBO Max in the US |
| Episodes | 6 |
| Season two | Renewed December 2025, adapting The Long Game |
Two rookies who never existed
The series follows two of the best players of their generation, one Canadian and one Russian, who meet young and spend roughly eight years in a relationship neither of them can acknowledge in public. Neither man has a real world counterpart, and no reporting has produced one.
Reid published the novel through Carina Press in March 2019 as the second entry in her Game Changers series. The whole sequence grew out of a hypothetical she set herself: what it would look like for a player to come out and end up happy, safe and fulfilled, and then what the ripple effect would be for everyone else in the sport. That is a premise, not a case study.
The rivalry Rachel Reid was actually watching
Reid has pointed at a real rivalry as her starting point, the long running comparison between Sidney Crosby and Alexander Ovechkin, and specifically at HBO’s 24/7 series covering the 2011 NHL Winter Classic between their two teams. Wayne Gretzky and Jaromir Jagr have also been cited as reference points she used while building the characters.
That is an influence, and it is worth naming it as one. Asked what people get wrong about her, Reid’s answer was that she does not, in fact, think real male hockey players are hot. Reading the show as a coded account of two named NHL stars misreads what she did with the material.
Major League Hockey is not the NHL
The series carries no NHL branding. Shane and Ilya play in Major League Hockey, for teams including the Montreal Metros, the Boston Raiders and the New York Admirals. Partly that is a licensing decision, but it is also a reliable tell. A drama reconstructing something that happened would need the real league, the real clubs and real dates, because those are the load bearing details. A romance can invent the whole map.
The production was Canadian throughout, from Accent Aigu Entertainment and Bell Media, shot across Ontario and Quebec with Hamilton as the base and every hockey sequence filmed at the Sleeman Centre in Guelph.
The record on hockey players coming out
This is where real life supplies the tension the fiction is built on. In July 2021, Luke Prokop, an Alberta defenceman drafted by the Nashville Predators in 2020 and signed to a three year contract, became the first player under an NHL contract to publicly come out as gay. He was 19, and he wrote that he was no longer scared to hide who he was. Reporting at the time noted that no other NHL player, active or retired, had done so publicly.
So the documented backdrop is not a couple whose story got adapted. It is an absence, and a novelist deciding to write into it. That gap is also why the show landed the way it did: it became the most watched original series on Crave and a significant driver of new viewers on HBO Max, and it drew responses from people inside the sport rather than just from readers of the book.
Why season two follows a second novel
The show was renewed in December 2025 for a second season, set to adapt The Long Game, Reid’s 2022 follow up, with a spring 2027 target. That is a useful structural answer to the true story question on its own: a production retelling real events does not have its future mapped by a publishing schedule.
Reid stayed close to the adaptation, reading scripts including early drafts and visiting the set, after creator Jacob Tierney sent her his pitch in a direct message in August 2023. If any part of the series had a factual source to be checked against, she would have been the person checking it. What she was checking instead was her own book.
