The National Hockey League has delivered again. Another outdoor game for the ages, in the biggest sporting facility in the world. Back in 2008, when NBC’s Sam Flood came up with the idea of playing an outdoor game on New Year’s Day, pitting hockey head-to-head with college football bowl games, it was a giant gamble. Well, year after year, the gamble has paid off.
New Year’s Day 2008 saw the first Winter Classic between
Pittsburgh and Buffalo at Ralph Wilson Stadium (home of the NFL’s Buffalo
Bills) and it was an instant hit: hockey in a snow globe, with fans bundled up
against the cold, with the league’s most marketable star, Sidney Crosby, won
the game in a dramatic, snow-filled shootout. It was ratings gold, and the
novelty of an outdoor contest got eyeballs tuning into NBC. And so a tradition
was born.
Fast forward to 2013, and the NHL has seen a string of
successful Winter Classic events: Chicago and Detroit renewed their blood
rivalry at Wrigley Field, Boston and Philadelphia went to overtime at Fenway
Park, Washington and Pittsburgh played under lights at Heinz Field in
Pittsburgh after a weather delay, and the New York Rangers survived a late
penalty shot to beat Philadelphia at Citizens Bank Park.
All those games built the Winter Classic brand to where it
is now: to the point where more than 105,000 fans – a world record crowd for
hockey – packed into Michigan Stadium on a snowy, cold, blustery day where
conditions pretty much ensured that the Detroit vs. Toronto match-up would be more
of an event than a game. It didn’t matter. The atmosphere was enough.
NBC and the NHL have, together, done what many thought to be
impossible: they’ve managed to draw a sizeable chunk of viewers away from the
college football games that once dominated New Year’s Day. They’ve done it by
presenting hockey in it’s purest form – outdoors, in the elements – and
stacking whatever venue the game is being played in with seemingly a hundred
cameras to capture the event from every conceivable angle.
Add to the great visuals the undisputed Voice of Hockey in
America, Mike ‘Doc’ Emrick, perhaps the best play-by man in any sport in
America, and a reliable analyst in Ed Olczyk, who can make the game simple
enough for those casual once-a-year viewer, and NBC puts the perfect words to
go with images that speak for themselves.
Certainly, the hockey was not as good as it would have been
at Detroit’s Joe Louis Arena or Toronto’s Air Canada Centre but the party
atmosphere as inch upon inch of snow fell before and during the sixty minutes
of regulation hockey, a five-minute sudden death period and the game-deciding
shootout. It’s tough to push the puck through piles of snow that built up as
quickly as the NHL’s ice crew could shovel them away. Pucks took strange
bounces and rolls, crisp passing was at a premium, but there was a pleasing
amount of physicality out there.
How either of the goalies, Jimmy Howard or Jonathan Bernier,
saw the puck through the usual mass of humanity screening them in front and
snow swirling all around is beyond me. The way the puck was moving about,
influenced by both the wind and snow, the Winter Classic could well have ended
with an All-Star Game score line, but it didn’t, because Bernier and Howard
were dynamite. If anyone earned their money today, it was the two guys guarding
the nets.
The legendary Big House was the perfect showcase for two of
the greatest franchises in NHL history. Including a Canadian team for the first
time was a masterstroke by the League who, despite having something of a
history of messing things up, seem to be treating the outdoor New Year’s Day
game concept like a fragile piece of jewellery, knowing that one or two missteps
and the whole thing breaks down.
Having the Maple Leafs in town was an undoubted success. It
was surely a gamble for the League, despite the fact that Toronto is the
beating heart of hockey, but it paid off in a huge way, and took the Winter
Classic to a new level. Leafs fans streamed down from Canada in their tens of
thousands, and seemed louder, at times, than the Red Wings supporters who
aren’t exactly known for being hesitant to cheer their team.
Clearly, Americans have embraced the concept, Canadian team
participating or not. The television ratings proved as much. The game drew a
2.9 overnight, tying the 2014 Winter Classic for the most watched outdoor game
in the six-event history. 2009’s Wrigley face-off between Detroit and Chicago
drew the same number, and the lowest Winter Classic rating was a 2.4 for the
New York Rangers/Philadelphia Flyers game in 2012, which wasn’t on New Year’s
Day due to it being an NFL Sunday.
Detroit, even with Michigan State in the Rose Bowl Game,
drew an 18.0 rating, which is solid gold for hockey, and up from 10.5 for the
2009 contest. Other ratings successes? New York, where the outdoor game
out-rated every Rangers, Devils and Islanders game this season. In major cities
like Chicago, Boston, Minneapolis-St Paul and Philadelphia, the game rated in
the Top 10 for all programs on New Year’s Day. With results like that –
granted, these are in traditional hockey markets – it’s of little wonder the
League’s front office hasn’t made any radical changes to how the event unfolds.
If only Commissioner Bettman’s people would adopt the same approach to other
matters.
As the Team USA Olympic roster was announced post-game, I
started to wonder how the NHL could possibly top this. I mean, it’s not like we
can send this game to a bigger stadium, is it? For what it’s worth, I think the
game needs to stay in northern markets, and including a Canadian team, say,
every second or third year, opens up a whole new level of publicity and buzz in
a country where hockey is more than sport. It’s religion up north.
If the rumours are to be believed, it’ll be Washington vs.
Philadelphia at National’s Park in the heart of the nation’s capital. That will
be fun, and a good chance to showcase stars like Ovechkin and Giroux, but
recreating the atmosphere of 100,000+ will be a tough task going forward.
As good as following years’ will likely be, 2014’s Winter
Classic, because of the snow, the crowd and the end, might well be seen as the
high-water mark for the concept.
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