Alberta Review: Hockey is Back
Alberta Review: Hockey is Back
Alberta is a hockey province, first and foremost, and for good reason.
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Hockey is back.
Both the Oilers and the Flames play their first pre-season games (I’ll be attending the former’s); anticipation has been high. For one franchise that fell just short of a Stanley Cup, everyone is eager to get back at it. For the other, who is finally committed to a rebuild, there’s a lot of excitement around a young team building around a core of veterans. Everyone wants to see what the season brings, and before the 82 stretch officially kicks off, everyone is hopeful.
Alberta is a hockey province. A recent poll found that 57 per cent of Albertans prefer hockey as their number one sport. Amongst major metros, 75 per cent of Edmontonians follow hockey, compared to 30 per cent in the GTA and 38 per cent in Montreal (Calgary was at 43 per cent, just a percentage point higher than Vancouver).
Of course, in Edmonton, a nearly won championship and the two best players in the world will grow the sport to that 75 per cent market share. But there are always other reasons.
Perhaps the biggest driver is the same as so many other things in this province—two big cities competing. Unlike other provinces save Ontario, Alberta has two NHL teams. Rarely are they both in a championship window (Edmonton ended Calgary’s after the 2021 playoffs and the exodus of stars from the Flames as a result), but the rivalry runs deep. Most Flames fans chose Florida in the finals—it would hurt too much to see Edmonton win. Should the roles ever be reversed, I’m sure you’d see the same up north.
The other is that we’re a rich province, and hockey is an expensive sport. It takes up an exorbitant amount of time for the players and their parents, so only those with high-paying and flexible jobs can have their kids play it. And both the trades—with its shift work—and the white-collar work that supports it offer that kind of work. As a result, Alberta produces nearly 14 per cent of active Canadian NHL players despite only making up 11.8 per cent of the Canadian population.
Albertans also like competition, and they like doing hard things because they are hard. Hockey is the most difficult sport in the world, and the Stanley Cup is the hardest championship to win. The physicality, finesse, and endurance required are incomparable, like how the oil sands are the hardest oil to refine in the world or how we took the desert that was the Palliser Triangle and built a world-class agricultural industry. The hard things speak to us.
Hockey is also a rural and suburban sport, and—despite being one of Canada’s most urbanized provinces—Alberta is, in spirit, a rural and suburban province. From the above-cited poll about sports preferences:
“Sports preferences are clearly split between urban and suburban/rural watchers. In rural areas, 45% prefer hockey, while in the suburbs, that number is 41.8%. In urban areas, the number drops to 34.8%. In comparison, basketball leads in the cities (12.4%) versus the suburbs (8.1%) and rural Canada (2.8%).”
Similar to the rural-urban split is the class one; hockey is also a blue-collar sport, and Alberta is a blue-collar province, at least in spirit. Even those who don’t work blue-collar jobs are more closely connected to those professions than in many other service economies, and so the culture and appeal remain strong. It’s been ages since Edmonton was anything but a government town, but that blue-collar, agriculture, manufacturing, and coal mining ethos remains.
At the end of the day, this is all a long-winded way of saying that I’m incredibly excited that hockey is back. We have two NHL and WHL teams, nation-leading U Sports programs, and a host of homegrown talent. There is truly no better place to be a hockey fan than Alberta, and it all starts today.
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Alberta Review is in no way associated with previous iterations of the publication Alberta Review.