We’ll continue with this week’s series of occasional articles during the NHL’s mid-way point of their season.
This coming Friday, January 1, the National Hockey League will present its 3rd annual Winter Classic game, a match held outdoors in a sports arena. The first outdoor game of the modern era was played on November 22, 2003, at Edmonton’s Commonwealth Stadium. The Heritage Classic, as it was billed, was between the Edmonton Oilers and the Montreal Canadiens and was the first regular season outdoor game in the history of the National Hockey League.
The success of the experiement led to the league’s scheduling another outdoor contest and billed it the Winter Classic, played on Jan. 1 in 2008 in the Orchard Park, New York, home of the Buffalo Bills football team. The game was scheduled as an experiment to see how well it was received by the fans. They ended up with an NHL-record crowd of 71,217 fans in attendance to watch the Buffalo Sabres play the Pittsburgh Penguins.
That success led to another outdoor game the following year when the Classic was played in Chicago’s Wrigley Field between the Chicago Black Hawks and the Detroit Red Wings. Not only was that game a sell-out, but the tv ratings for the game were the highest television ratings of any hockey game in 33 years. That was enough to make it an annual event for the foreseeable future.
This week’s game will be played in Boston’s Fenway Park where the Bruins will host the Philadelphia Flyers at 1pm Eastern time. The players love to participate in the outdoor games and they look forward to the opportunities to play. An interesting piece of trivia holds that goaltender Ty Conklin has participated in all three of the NHL’s regular-season outdoor games played so far. He appeared as anOiler in 2003, a Penguin in 2008 and a Red Wing in 2009. Interestingly, on each occasion he was not his team’s starting goaltender even a month prior to the outdoor games, however injuries had sidelined teammates Tommy Salo, Marc-Andre Fleury and Chris Osgood. Conklin was quoted as saying “I count myself very lucky. There’s not a guy in this league who wouldn’t like to play in these games.”
The outdoor rink was assembled earlier this month at Fenway and the NHL took a time-lapse video of the construction of the playing surface:
Hey, let’s get the equipment checked out now. I’ve got to get some more coffee started. See you back in the day room.
