The Hockey Player

😁 The Hockey Player, dir. Jacqueline Doorey, 2026, Canada, 80 min.
Saturday, June 20, 2026, 1:00 PM, Castro Theatre
🌐 World premiere

The Hockey Player

Frameline blurb: Attention all Heated Rivalry devotées! Shot over the last five years, The Hockey Player follows Canadian-born defenseman Luke Prokop as he decides to become the first — and still only — professional athlete playing under contract to an NHL team to come out as gay. Growing up in Edmonton steeped in Canada’s tough, often homophobic hockey culture, and playing without gay role models throughout professional sports, Luke’s path to coming out of the closet has been neither easy nor obvious.

The film charts Prokop’s personal journey against the backdrop of a professional hockey industry that has had, at best, an ambivalent relationship to diversity. As the film sensitively reveals, being publicly out certainly came as an earthquake to his family, especially his father Al, who as Luke’s mentor and sometime coach represents the most complex and moving relationship in the film. In that way, like its fictional HBOMax counterpart, The Hockey Player is ultimately a love story — between a player and his family, and a player and his sport.

My take: Hockey has long been viewed as a sport for straight white middle class cis-men, with very few players falling outside that mold. Diversity has included a variety of European ethnicities like Russian, Finnish, and German, but very few non-white players and, until Luke Prokop, no openly LGBTQ+ players, although statistically there are certain to be some still in their closets.

The Hockey Player follows Prokop as he tries to make his way up from the NHL draft, first to the junior leagues (mandatory for players under 20 years old), then to farm teams, hoping to make it to the top-tier team. We see his journey as an openly gay athlete, the effects on his family, and the lingering question of how much effect his visibility as an out player has had on his career prospects. The NHL has made some significant strides to embracing at least the theoretical possibility of gay players, but there has been backlash, especially from players from countries like Russia. We also see the long slog of trying to climb up the ladder while wearing hockey skates.

If you’re a hockey fan, The Hockey Player is a must see, but even if you’re not, I would still give it a highly recommended. Heated Rivalry may be steamy, but this is a real-life story.

• IMDb • Official website • Production house • Filmmaker • Instagram: @UpperCanadaFilms ◦ @LukeProkop_ (note trailing underscore) • Facebook • preview • coverage in hockey press •