Mark Messier is preparing to make Game 7 his life’s work.

During his 25-year NHL career, the six-time Stanley Cup champion played in nine of the heart-pumping do-or-die affairs. He won seven times — most notably in 1994, when he made his ‘guarantee’ that the New York Rangers would come back from a 3-2 deficit to eliminate the New Jersey Devils in the Eastern Conference Final before the Rangers snapped their 54-year curse against the Vancouver Canucks in the Stanley Cup Final — also in Game 7.

On Thursday, Messier and an all-star team of business associates announced that they’ve acquired the intellectual property and licensing rights to the Game 7 brand. After more than two years of work behind the scenes, they’ll soon be launching a new performance lifestyle platform built around the enormous significance that Game 7 holds in the sporting world — and how those make-or-break moments are mirrored elsewhere in life.

“Game 7s become so compelling because of what they stand for,” said Messier, 62, who sits third on the NHL’s all-time list of points (1,887) and games played (1,756). He was inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame in 2007.

“For myself, I know how many instances that played such a huge part of my learning throughout my career culminated in those Game 7 moments,” he added. “There’s a lifetime of learning through them, in success and failure.”

The Game 7 platform will be built around that learning process, and how the challenging of meeting the most high-pressure moments translates from sports to other aspects of life and business — empowering others across the five pillars for success including gratitude, ambition, sacrifice, preparation and focus.

“You don’t have to be a sports person to to understand the elements like compassion, like hard work, like discipline, like trust,” Messier said. “All the things that — I’m not going to say they’re more important than the actual skill set that you need to play hockey, but they’re just as important from an individual standpoint.

“From a team standpoint, that’s really the culture that we’re dealing with,” he added. “Those five pillars really do talk about culture, how you create culture and what culture means.”

Messier’s partners in the project extend far beyond the sports world. Co-founders also include New York real estate developer Isaac Chera and actor and filmmaker Danny DeVito — whose Game 7 moment came when he booked the part of dispatcher Louie De Palma on the sitcom ‘Taxi’ in 1978.

“He knew this was his Game 7 moment, the make-or-break opportunity,” Messier recounted. “So he went in to read. They gave him the script. He looked at the script and tore it in half and threw it back at them and said, ‘Who wrote this crap?’ They said, ‘You’re Louie DePalma, you’re hired.’

“He was ready for that moment. He knew what he needed to do. He knew who Louie De Palma was before he went in there, and he nailed it. I think that really resonated with everybody, because everybody can have a Game 7 moment.”

With a background in the entertainment industry, particularly in merchandising for top stars in the music business, Mat Vlasic brings brand-building acumen as another Game 7 co-founder.

“We actually did a little research study,” Vlasic said. “It came back that one in every two people genuinely know and have watched a Game 7. That’s a pretty amazing-sized market.”

The investor list for Game 7 is both diverse and star-studded, with names including fashion magnate Tommy Hilfiger, sports executives Jeanie Buss and David Blitzer, NBA icons Chris Mullin and Joe Dumars and media personality and businessman Gary Vaynerchuk.

A content series is set to launch in 2024, in partnership between Game 7, DeVito’s production company Jersey Films 2nd Avenue and the production company Words + Pictures, whose CEO and founder Connor Schell created ESPN’s ‘30 for 30’ documentary brand and served as executive producer of the 2020 Chicago Bulls documentary, ‘The Last Dance.’

Leading up to that launch, it’s all about building community. That starts on social media, creating dialogue around Game 7 moments. A podcast will also be coming soon, along with ventures across hospitality, consumer products, and experiences.

“We wanted to to start to push out today and sort of plant the flag in the ground,” Vlasic said. “We just came off a phenomenal Game 7 season this year and an even more impressive one last year. We’re now up to a total of 401 Game 7s that have been played across leagues. So we’ve got a lot of content to to work from and a lot of exciting moments to talk about.”

The universal essence of the Game 7 experience is at the heart of the project, Messier said.

“As we curate Game 7, building a community, the top priority is to really understand and ask the question, ‘What is your Game 7 moment?’”