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Netflix’s upcoming hockey drama series The Sticks has been criticized by parents connected to 2018’s fatal Humboldt Broncos bus crash.
“From what I’m assuming, where they’re going with this is: bus crashes, hockey players die, wife picks up the team and brings them back to glory,” Scott Thomas, a father from Saskatchewan, Canada, who lost his son, Evan, in the tragedy, told local news outlet SaskNow in January. “And in the end, everybody’s happy. That’s just complete trash. That’s not what happened to us. At all.”
The opinions of Thomas, and other families impacted by the crash that killed 16 people including many from the Humboldt Broncos junior ice hockey team, resurfaced this week after Netflix released behind-the-scenes photos of The Sticks via X on Tuesday, August 11. The series will be released by the streamer in 2027.
Per a January report by The Canadian Press, Netflix told the outlet via an email at the time that The Sticks is “fictional and not inspired by any real-life event.”
Us has reached out to Netflix for further comment.
According to a Tudum by Netflix article published on Tuesday, The Sticks is set in South Dorothy, Minnesota, where “hockey is everything — until a tragic loss knocks the legs out from under the high school’s legendary team.”
Further detail about The Sticks read, “After tragedy shatters a small Minnesota hockey town, a grieving wife steps behind the bench of the team her husband built, guiding a found family of wounded young athletes through a season of loss, love, and rivalry that will decide whether South Dorothy has anything left to believe in, and who will lead it into its next chapter.”
The Canadian Press also spoke to Michelle Straschnitzki, whose son Ryan was left paralyzed from the chest down after a semi-trailer truck’s collision with the bus caused the Humboldt Broncos crash. “It does seem to sensationalize our own tragedy, but in a truly Hollywood fashion, they’re making it about them — their heartbreak, their loss, their rebuild,” Straschnitzki told the outlet. “They’re just out to make some money and make it their story, which is garbage.”
The mother added that she didn’t believe that The Sticks’ story is fictional.
“If you have been alive in the last eight years and you haven’t heard what happened on the grand scale that it was, across the world, then you’ve had your head in the sand,” she told the outlet at the time.
On April 6, 2018, 29 Humboldt Broncos team mates traveled northbound on a coach bus when a westbound truck went through a stop sign and hit the bus. Three months later, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police charged a 29-year-old man with 16 counts of dangerous operation of a motor vehicle causing death and thirteen counts of dangerous operation of a motor vehicle causing bodily injury. He pleaded guilty in January 2019 to all charges and was sentenced to eight years in prison, per Canada’s CBC.
He was granted full parole in 2023 and is currently residing in Canada while fighting a federal deportation order to return to his home country of India.
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