Amber Searls-Imagn Images/Gilbert Flores/Variety via Getty Images
While success at the Olympics can lead to numerous life changes, one undeniable way it’ll change an athlete’s life is popularity. Take gold medal winning ice skater Alysa Liu, for example: before the Olympics, she had around 200K followers. Now she’s at over 5 million. The same can be said about hockey star Jack Hughes, who became just the third active NHL player with over one million followers on IG.
New Jersey Devils star Jack Hughes has now joined Alex Ovechkin and Connor McDavid as the only players in the NHL to have over 1 million followers on Instagram, suggesting the 24-year-old is now one of the faces of the league
Jack Hughes just became the 3rd active NHL player to hit 1M Instagram followers. He’s +320k since scoring the Golden Goal. One of the new faces of the league 🦷 pic.twitter.com/JXmOzOJZnk
— Evan Sporer (@ev_sporer) February 24, 2026
WNBA star Angel Reese has more followers on Instagram than all 25 members of the United States men’s hockey team combined
Hughes’ spike in popularity, however, has also highlighted just how much hockey seems to be struggling for widespread popularity in the United States, as WNBA star Angel Reese has more IG followers than all 25 members of the gold medal winning hockey team combined.
🚨BREAKING: Angel Reese has more Instagram followers than the entire 25 player USA men’s hockey roster *combined* 🚨 pic.twitter.com/MT27WI72TV
— SUPER BOWL CHAMPIONS 🦅💙💚🏆🏆 (@phxsunz25) February 24, 2026
But what does social media popularity actually mean in terms of a sport’s relevance? When it comes to viewership, for example, the Stanley Cups Finals — while struggling year over year — still significantly outpaces the WNBA Finals.
The 2025 Stanley Cup Final viewership has 2.5 million average viewers on cable (TNT/truTV) for the Panthers-Oilers series, down from 4.17 million in 2024. The 2025 WNBA Finals, on the other hand, set a league-record with an average of 1.5 million viewers across four games.
But if you were to grab 30 sports fans off the street — 15 men and 15 women — and put NHL/WNBA stars in a police suspect-like line-up, odds are WNBA players such as Reese, Cailtin Clark, Paige Beuckers, Sabrina Ionescu and so on would be more widely recognized than the NHL stars.
And what that means is that hockey is struggling to develop new stars, but is able to maintain relevance through sheer staying-power: hockey is a core North American sport. On the other hand, while the WNBA continues to grow in terms of viewership (but not necessarily profitability), it has been succeeding at churning out individual stars in recent years — or, rather, giving former NCAA stars a platform to remain in the public eye.
What’s sure is this: after the excitement surrounding the Olympics, NHL suits will be praying that this year’s Stanley Cup Finals features markets bigger than South Florida and Edmonton.
Unfortunately for the league, though, big market teams such as the New York Rangers, Philadelphia Flyers, Washington Capitals, Toronto Maple Leafs, Los Angeles Kings, and Chicago Blackhawks are currently struggling to even make the playoffs, let alone make a run to the finals.