Steven Ruiz Leaving The Ringer for Fox Sports
One of the most talked about hockey teams of the past several years does not exist.
The Sudbury Blueberry Bulldogs are the fictional team at the heart of the show Shoresy, which follows a patchwork crew of small-town Canadian hockey players in a self-proclaimed “senior whale shit” league, the Northern Ontario Senior Hockey Organization. (Aptly, the NOSHO.) Shoresy, constantly chirping with a dip cup in hand, is their fearless captain. Played by creator Jared Keeso, there’s no character quite like him.
At the same time, the cast, producers, and business minds behind Shoresy have also made sure the Bulldogs are as real as any sports team. Their efforts have set the tone for wild fandom—and also created a big revenue opportunity.
The show, which releases its fourth season in the U.S. on Hulu on Feb. 26, is an offshoot of Keeso’s acclaimed Canadian comedy Letterkenny, which follows a group of “hicks,” “skids,” and hockey players in a tiny Ontario town. In Letterkenny, hockey player Shoresy is an ongoing gag character who is constantly heckling teammates in the gym or locker room, often from a bathroom stall.
Shoresy has only a small part and remains faceless in Letterkenny—yet the spin-off production that improbably brings him to life has garnered a uniquely cult-level following. This devotion has driven Shoresy to pop off the screen and morph into an entire brand that feels even more tangible than both its parent show and sports peers like Ted Lasso.
Merch peppers the stands in any given hockey game across North America, especially the team’s sky-blue-and-brown jersey with a bulldog crunching on a hockey stick. The jerseys sell for $200 in the U.S., and Joel Baskin of the Feldman Agency, which handles live event bookings for Letterkenny and Shoresy, tells Front Office Sports he’s heard beer league teams have placed bulk orders to outfit themselves on the ice.
The biggest move for the show as a business has come from its live extension. In 2024, Shoresy went from screen to rink with the Shoresy Fall Classic: A series of real hockey games where the cast, many of whom are former players from various levels, competed against NHL alumni.
“We always dreamed of doing live touring opportunities, taking the show on the road,” says Mark Montefiore, founder and CEO of New Metric Media, producer of Letterkenny and Shoresy. “When we got to Shoresy, it was an ongoing joke. … ‘We’ve got to do Shoresy on ice.’” They’d agreed to bring it to life, and the show’s executive producer, Kara Haflidson, suggested reaching out to the NHL. Once they heard the big idea, Montefiore says, “We were like, ‘Holy shit.’”
Haflidson’s grand ambitions were right on. The response was rabid for the five games, the first two of which were arranged with the Boston Bruins and Toronto Maple Leafs, which as Original Six teams have two of the largest alumni associations.
The Maple Leafs organization tells FOS the roughly 7,500 tickets sold out in less than 30 hours at about $45 each, and quickly hit the secondary market for more than $200. “I’m going, ‘This is an alumni game like I’ve never seen,’” says Steven Merkley, coordinator for the Maple Leafs Alumni Association. “I’ve done 52 games with the Maple Leafs alumni. I was like, ‘This show is bigger than I ever thought possible.’”
Baskin saw secondary prices spike above $300. He says, “People were just so genuinely excited for whatever was going to happen out there without there even being much detail about what it was.”
Merkley says he has never had so many former players contact him and say, “I need to be involved in this.” Frank Simonetti, a former NHL player and president of the Boston Bruins Alumni Association, also says there was so much interest to participate in the game that the Bruins organization had to “turn people down” and “make some tough cuts.” As the alumni took the ice, Simonetti says they received “polite golf claps … when the Shoresy team was announced, one of our teammates turned and said to me, ‘It’s like Bobby Orr just skated on.’”
There was competitive hockey. There were haymakers. There were fans from thousands of miles away, jumping out of their seats to drink the Puppers beer featured on the show and meet the cast after the game. In the first two markets alone, the events each raised more than $20,000 for charity and also netted a profit for the Shoresy team.
The Fall Classics build off the success of Letterkenny Live, a touring version of Keeso’s predecessor show, from which New Metric Media has seen success across North America. But the Shoresy world presents more like a universe.
New Metric Media and the Feldman Agency tell FOS more Fall Classics are in the offing. They say they were overwhelmed with city and venue options for the initial games and are going to seize new markets, especially after the response to the first five events, which also included Buffalo, Detroit, and Chicago. From their e-commerce, social media accounts, and streaming platforms including Crave in Canada, the Shoresy team is awash in audience data to help them pinpoint locations for the next wave. “We’re moneyballing it,” says Montefiore.
Shoresy is not done building an off-screen business. In the coming months, New Metric Media will release an arcade-style video game set in Sudbury. COO Jeff Hersh says “it’s Blades of Steel meets NBA Jam … with the chirps and the fights. It’ll be a bit over the top.” The game will first release on Steam, then the creators are hoping to roll it out to Nintendo Switch, Playstation, and Xbox. Baskin—who calls the show “the perfect marriage between art and commerce”—nods at more to come, too.
“When you see the Bulldogs logo, it’s ‘work hard, push through.’ That really resonates with a lot of people,” says Montefiore. “When they see the logo, they want to be part of that. Sure, the catchphrases are hilarious, but it’s deeper than that. I think people really see themselves in both those worlds [of Letterkenny and Shoresy]. … The more specific it becomes, the broader it actually gets.”
“Jared and the producers just really tapped hockey culture and the hockey fanatics,” says Baskin. He says slang from the shows, like “dirty dangles” for top-tier stickhandling, has shown up on SportsCenter. “There’s never been a drama-comedy show that captures the eyes and ears of the hockey world. This one has set the bar in doing so.”
As the new episodes, which focus on a debaucherous offseason, premiere, the cult is only spreading. At 4 Nations Face-Off in Montréal, a fan in line at the retail outpost sported a Shoresy logo beanie. And a couple of months earlier, on a shoulder-to-shoulder escalator in Madison Square Garden, Rangers fans descended to the exits after a loss against the Blackhawks. In the sea of red, white, and royal blue, one fan stood out in sky-blue and brown. Another person couldn’t help calling out to her, pointing to the bulldog logo. They exchanged a knowing nod.
