Parenting & Family Quote by Bobby Hull

Hull isn’t just complaining about hockey’s popularity; he’s puncturing one of the sport’s cherished myths: that the game’s passion is portable, that you can drop a rink anywhere and devotion will follow. The bluntness - “gives a crap,” “nobody” twice - is doing rhetorical work. It’s the language of a guy who’s spent a lifetime in arenas where hockey is religion, suddenly confronted with a place where it’s just another after-school option competing with sunlight, football, basketball, and whatever kids can play without special gear and a refrigerated building.

The subtext is quieter and sharper: development pipelines aren’t only about coaching and ice time; they’re about culture. Hull’s vantage point as a kids’ coach matters. He’s not talking ratings or NHL expansion hype. He’s describing the earliest point where a sport either takes root or doesn’t: whether children choose it when nobody is forcing the choice. “You can start to see the disinterest” reads like a scout’s report, not a hot take - attention drifting, commitment thinning, the small signals that tell you a community isn’t going to sustain the long, expensive apprenticeship hockey demands.

Contextually, it lands as an uneasy counterpoint to the league’s long push into “non-traditional” markets. Hull’s frustration hints at the limits of top-down growth: you can build franchises and sell jerseys, but you can’t manufacture the local obsession that turns kids into lifers. Coming from a legend, it’s also a small act of identity defense - a reminder that hockey’s core isn’t just geography, it’s a shared intensity that not every place wants.