“Is Zac Bell on the ice right now?”
That’s been a common question asked of employees at the Carolina Ice Palace — primarily coming from kids between 8 and 11 years old — since the 22-year-old trick-shot artist posted on social media earlier this week that he was on location in Charleston. , South Carolina, filming a hockey-related movie.
NHLers David Krejci and Torey Krug train at the same rink most mornings, but Bell is the one who gets flooded with selfie requests as soon as he steps off the ice — and accommodates the young fans with a smile and a fistbump.
He’s the most sought-after hockey celebrity in South Carolina, a traveling hockey phenomenon with a following that has expanded beyond the sport.
“It’s nothing that I really would have expected,” Bell says. “It wasn’t master planned or anything like that.”
Bell’s playing days were ended by multiple head injuries in 2019, but his career in hockey — and it is a full-time career — was just getting started. In 2020, he leaned back into a trick-shot platform, Always Hockey, which he had originally launched in 2014 on Instagram.
“There was a point where I decided to fold (Always Hockey) away, and I said, ‘No, I don’t want to be this person.’ I don’t want to be always hockey. I just want to be Zac Bell,’” Bell says. “So I took the time to just play AAA hockey, go play junior hockey, and I just took all of my mindset out of the social media. I just felt I just wanted to be a normal hockey player.
“But that changed and that was taken from me, so I got back to (Always Hockey) during my dark-room period. And I was back home recovering, and I just did this one video out in the driveway, and you know, I did a quick little 360 spin I caught on the shaft, threw it up, slapped a bar down, and I woke up the next morning and it was like our first real genuine mainstream viral video. We woke up to 5 million plus (views) on the one video on TikTok and on Instagram.”
The clip went beyond traditional hockey circles, appearing on news networks in the United States and Canada — including NBC, CNN and Fox — and, during a time when news was dominated by COVID-19, Bell’s trick shots filled a hole in sports coverage.
“There weren’t any professional athletes. There wasn’t anything going on. No NHL. Nothing. It was all stopped,” Bell says. “So all of a sudden, it was all eyes on us.”
Bell has carried over the momentum since hockey restarted, becoming a branding success story and a mainstream face in the sport. He has nearly 850,000 followers on TikTok. The Toronto Maple Leafs, for comparison, have just over 370,000 — and they have had TikTok as a helmet sponsor. He also has a signature stick with Bauer, was part of the NHL All-Star Game in Las Vegas in February, and when EA Sports launched its NHL 23 advertising campaign, he was heavily featured alongside cover athletes Sara Nurse and Trevor Zegras.
Multiple NHL teams have contacted Bell about trick-shot performances at their games this season.
Bell takes the recognition as a point of pride, but he says it’s secondary to the part he can play in growing the game among those who wouldn’t have paid attention if not for trick-shot videos.
“As soon as it escaped the niche that is hockey and we started getting calls from mainstream platforms, that’s when we felt like it was something more,” Bell says. “We started getting opportunities outside of hockey, and we started really captivating an audience and a demographic of people that, frankly, have never seen snow.”
Bell heavily uses the term “we” when discussing his business, which is reflective of what Always Hockey has become. He is the one performing the trick shots, but he now travels with close friend Jordan Burnett, who is a combination of cameraman, confidant and creative sounding board.
“It gets to a point where you can almost get lonely and lost in your own headspace, especially when you’re a creator,” Bell says. “So it was really nice to have Jordan become an official partner in this. Jordan comes in and he shows that different perspective, or he sees from behind the camera, and he adds that little input that maybe ends up making the video possible.”
Bell says he’s looking forward to exploring new spaces this season, including more live performances, in addition to building on the social media base.
“I think we are still just at the beginning of figuring out everything this can be,” he says.
National TV schedules
ESPN and Turner announced their remaining national schedules Wednesday. The NHL had previously announced that the networks would have back-to-back opening doubleheaders on Oct. 11 (ESPN) and 12 (TNT). It should be noted that the league season officially starts on Oct. 7 and 8 with games in Prague, each at 1 pm Eastern, between the Nashville Predators and San Jose Sharks.
Turner’s national schedule includes 60 regular-season games, primarily on Wednesday evenings, with more doubleheaders this season than in 2021-22.
TNT will still have the Winter Classic and picks up the Black Friday marquee game in a trade with ESPN. ESPN will have the Stadium Series game after it was on TNT last season. ESPN will still carry the All-Star Game and skills competition.
As part of the seven-year TV deal, the Stanley Cup switches from ESPN to Turner this season. The networks alternate coverage of the Stanley Cup Final throughout the deal, with each getting one conference final after splitting the first two rounds.
ESPN will carry 103 exclusive games across ESPN, ESPN2, ABC, ESPN+ and Hulu. Fifty-three of those games will be streaming exclusives on ESPN+ and Hulu.
ESPN’s scheduling has changed slightly from Year 1 of its seven-year deal with the NHL. After focusing more heavily on ESPN+ and Hulu exclusive streaming games, there is a higher percentage of linear or traditional games on the docket this season. ESPN is also planning on having less overlap of its national games during the regular season, which will hurt viewership numbers.
There are a couple of key reasons for this. For starters, Turner has the Stanley Cup Final this season after ESPN carried it in 2022. When it comes to advertising buys, boosting the inventory elsewhere was important. According to multiple sources, ESPN also saw better returns than expected on the NHL’s out-of-market streaming package, which migrated onto the platform from NHL.TV last season. While ESPN+ exclusives for national games helped subscriber numbers, it wasn’t as crucial as expected for the network when it came to converting hockey fans into ESPN+ subscribers.
(Photo courtesy of Zac Bell)
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