Joe Pavelski, who racked up 1,068 points over an 18-season NHL career with San Jose and Dallas, didn’t wait long to find his next win. A year after hanging up his skates, he captured the 2025 American Century Championship, the Super Bowl of the celebrity golf circuit, with a walk-off eagle on 18.
To a casual sports fan who may only cursorily glance at previous winners, it looked sudden. But the W was a long time coming. The four-time all-star forward had racked up eight top-10 finishes there before, including three runner-up showings. The difference this time could easily have been more time to focus on golf with his hockey life in the rearview.
With the NHL playoffs now underway, a reality lurks beneath the surface for every team on the outside. As leagues expand and a smaller fraction play on, the sting of an early exit has been blunted because now they’ve got more time to be somewhere else and that is often the first tee of a swank golf course.
Early playoff exits extend hockey’s “golf season,” creating new opportunities as players head to the course, while resorts increasingly lean into the trend.
Resorts Turn Early Exits Into Tee Times
Fox Harb’r, a golf resort in Nova Scotia, leaned into the concept with a billboard campaign in Toronto’s downtown pedestrian tunnel system, targeting beleaguered Maple Leafs fans whose team missed the postseason for the first time in nine years. The ads pair course glamour shots with pithy copy like “a short season just means more time for the short game” and “Don’t worry, there are 18 cups waiting for you here.”
That concept of hockey’s ‘golf season’ as both punchline and consolation has become embedded in the sport’s culture.
“It’s endured because it’s one of those jokes that everyone gets to be in on—players, fans, even the broadcasters. It’s gentle ribbing more than anything else. By April, everyone knows who’s headed where, and the notion of “golf season” has become the hockey world’s version of a silver lining or coping mechanism. It lands because it’s true,” Kevin Toth, President, Fox Har’br resort, said
“A lot of these guys genuinely do head straight to the course, and it gives fans a way to talk about a tough ending without it feeling too heavy. What we liked about leaning into it with this campaign is that the joke has an undertone of a warm welcome,” he added.
At a resort that sees its fair share of active NHL players, Toth has witnessed firsthand the frustration of a prematurely ended Cup chase soothed with some quality time out on the golf course.
“Hockey is a long, intense season, and the course has always been where a lot of that energy goes once things wrap up. By the time someone’s on a tee box in May, whatever happened in March doesn’t feel quite as sharp anymore,” he explained.
“They arrive a little quiet, and by the second round, they’re laughing about club selection and arguing over who’s buying at the 19th. It’s not profound — it’s a release, a breeze, and good company. So yes, I think it’s more than a punchline at this point. It’s a kind of reset the sport has built into itself.”
Miming a golf swing has long been a go-to taunt in the NHL, aimed at teams destined to miss the postseason or headed for an early exit—though timing is everything. As a rookie, Brad Marchand, a future master instigator, learned that lesson the hard way. After scoring a shorthanded goal, he mocked the Maple Leafs’ bench with the gesture, drawing a reprimand from then–Bruins coach Claude Julien. The jab backfired, with his mock golf swing firing up Toronto, which went on to win in a shootout.
While on-ice taunts have become rarer due to the risk of drawing an unsportsmanlike conduct penalty, content creators have filled the chirping void with ‘golf season’ parodies. A prime example is Coach Chippy’s locker room sketches following the Leafs’ 2023 exit, which leaned into the team’s premature focus on the links.
He portrayed Auston Matthews as more fixated on testing out his freshly regripped golf clubs, and William Nylander as genuinely gobsmacked to learn the playoffs go beyond one round ahead of the squad’s end-of-season golf trip to Florida.
What started as a creative chirp is now stitched into the vernacular—less insult, more itinerary, as the shift from the rink to the links has become engrained as hockey’s preferred therapy.
