The romance at the center of HBO Max’s scintillating hockey drama Heated Rivalry has taken pop culture by storm — and it turns out the relationship has some very real-life roots.
Rachel Reid, who wrote the Game Changers book series on which Heated Rivalry is based, had two bonafide NHL superstars in mind when she created the characters of Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov.
“One of my inspirations for Heated Rivalry was, obviously, the extremely entertaining rivalry between [Sidney] Crosby and [Alexander] Ovechkin,” Reid wrote on her website.
Crosby, 38, and Ovechkin, 40, have had a generational on-ice rivalry since they both broke into the NHL in 2005, though romantic sparks are not believed to have ever flown between the pair away from the rink.
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The same, of course, cannot be said for Hollander, played by Hudson Williams, and Rozanov, played by Connor Storrie.
Hollander is comparable to Crosby, both soft-spoken Canadians, while Rozanov mirrors Ovechkin, a notoriously more brash and vocal Russian star.
“I was also inspired by other sports rivalries, by other fictional stories, and by my love of the enemies-to-lovers and forbidden romance tropes,” Reid further explained. “My characters are original, and I work hard on creating them.”
Last month, Crosby and Ovechkin went head-to-head for the 99th time in their NHL careers, the latest chapter in two parallel hockey journeys that will likely never be matched again.
“I think it’s great,” Crosby told reporters at the time. “It was great when we first started playing against each other as far as just the rivalry and bringing the best out of everyone. I think it was great for hockey and still is.”
Ovechkin, who became the NHL’s all-time leading goal scorer in April, admitted that his relationship with Crosby wasn’t always so breezy.
“Me and Sid, to be honest with you, the first couple of years it was not that good,” Ovechkin said on ESPN’s The Pat McAfee Show in April. “But now we talk [and congratulate] each other if we hit some milestones. Those relationships — from the battle inside of hockey and outside of hockey — it’s a totally different thing.”
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Ovechkin added, “After the game, we always talk. We’re always chatting. We have respect [for] each other. What we did to the NHL is a tremendous thing. Me and him, what we did all those years, it’s great for us. People are going to talk about Crosby and Ovechkin, Pittsburgh and Washington, for 50 more years. It’s a battle, but it’s a friendship right now.”
As for Heated Rivalry, showrunner Jacob Tierney explained that the show’s success can be directly linked to the chemistry between Storrie and Williams.
“They were essentially cast at the same time. It was very clear to us that we needed to find Shane and Ilya together,” Tierney told Out in November. “This show lives and dies with them, so we needed to make sure that this worked together. There are terrific actors who are in, you know… They’re just in different shows. You need to find the people who are going to be together in the same show, and that’s what the two of them had quite instantly.”
The first three episodes of Heated Rivalry are available to stream now on HBO Max, with new episodes dropping on Fridays.