The NHL is opening its doors and promising another look behind the scenes with the return of a docuseries to Amazon Prime in Fall 2025.
The second season of “FACEOFF: Inside the NHL” has been greenlit following the successful release of the inaugural series earlier this year, Prime Video announced Thursday.
Season 2 will return with six episodes and include more time spent with Ottawa Senators captain Brady Tkachuk, who appeared briefly in the third episode of Season 1 alongside his father Keith and brother Matthew.
The other NHL players featured in Season 2 will be announced at a later date.
Season 1 spotlighted some of the league’s biggest stars — including Connor McDavid, Matthew Tkachuk, Quinn Hughes, David Pastrnak and William Nylander — and drew its most powerful and lasting scenes from the access granted to McDavid during the Edmonton Oilers playoff run that fell one win shy of the Stanley Cup.
As thrilled as NHL chief content officer Steve Mayer was with the final product in Season 1, he told The Athletic in October that he was “praying” for a second season because “there’s so many little things along the way that we think we can do better.”
For starters, the first camera crews weren’t dispatched until March last season, forcing the stories to be told exclusively around players who were on playoff teams. That won’t need to be the case in Season 2. The league also believes there’s an opportunity to more deeply explore the off-ice relationships that help define the game’s biggest players.
“We want to have people who have families and girlfriends or wives,” said Mayer. “We want to do more of that. That makes the episodes really great when you can do a whole story on their spouse. You can do things that are over there (away from the game) and don’t always have to deal with player access, player access, more player access.”
The NHL will again produce the docuseries in partnership with Box To Box. That’s the company behind several other popular sports series in the genre, including “Formula 1: Drive to Survive” and the PGA Tour’s “Full Swing.”
Box To Box was highly impressed with how many doors were opened to them during their first foray into the NHL — particularly when compared to what they’ve dealt with in other arenas.
“Some other sports are just more managed,” Paul Martin, the company’s co-founder, told The Athletic earlier this year. “There’s more layers to kind of get through. Some sports feel they don’t have work to do. But there was definitely a feeling that hockey wanted a show like this.”
Before Season 1 was officially launched, he said he was eager for a Season 2, provided the viewership numbers matched the product.
Martin had heard that NHL players would be reluctant to stand out among the crowd, but his company’s first-hand experiences didn’t reinforce that notion.
“There’s a culture within hockey of not to put yourself forward as an individual, and I think that was the biggest challenge we had,” Martin said. “But I think this new generation who share more on social media, they’re much more willing to say, ‘Hey, I’m happy to put myself out there if it helps grow the game of hockey.”‘
(Photo of Brady Tkachuk: Steph Chambers / Getty Images)
