SEATTLE — Kraken forward Jordan Eberle remembers watching 20 years ago as his childhood favorite team, the Edmonton Oilers, played host to the NHL's first regular-season outdoor contest.
That game on Nov. 22, 2003 at Commonwealth Stadium in Edmonton, Alberta, saw the Oilers defeated, 4-3, by Montreal in front of more than 57,000 fans on a day with a wind chill of minus-22 degrees. There were huge doubts, given the deep freeze, about whether outdoor NHL hockey would be something players and fans would want to continue.
"I remember it was freezing cold," said Eberle, then 13 and watching on television from his Regina, Saskatchewan, home. "I remember watching the guys on the bench struggling. I don't remember what the temperature was like, but you could tell that they were cold."
And yet the players and fans, some suffering frostbite in the stands, loved it. Still, that cold caused enough concern that it took five more years before the NHL made outdoor hockey an annual tradition, one that continues Monday at T-Mobile Park as Eberle and the Kraken are thrust into the national spotlight while hosting the Vegas Golden Knights in the 15th NHL Winter Classic.
"It's cool to see how that started and where it's gone to now and how many they do," Eberle said. "It's great for the league. It builds the game. And I think that's what we all try to do."
Five years after that Edmonton game, dubbed the "Heritage Classic," the NHL resumed outdoor contests on Jan. 1, 2008 with the first "Winter Classic." Pittsburgh defeated the hometown Buffalo Sabres, 2-1, in a snowstorm at Ralph Wilson Stadium. Although that game nearly didn't happen because of the weather, the "Winter Classic" has since continued annually on New Year's Day in the U.S., and the "Heritage Classic" runs on random dates each season north of the border.
There's also a third regularly branded NHL outdoor set of games, the U.S.-based "Stadium Series" — which, like the Canadian event, also goes on random annual dates. And one-off specialty games, such as the "Centennial Classic" and "NHL 100 Classic" from 2017 in Canada celebrating the league's 100th anniversary.
So, yes, outdoor hockey has become big business for the NHL — Monday's game is the 39th such regular-season contest — helping sell multiple freighter ships worth of branded merchandise while significantly boosting overall league attendance figures. Last season's game at Fenway Park in Boston was the most-watched regular-season game ever on cable television, averaging 1.8 million viewers on TNT.
Monday's noon game on TNT will again feature Kenny Albert on play-by-play and Kraken broadcaster Eddie Olczyk doing analysis.
As with Edmonton's frigid cold and Buffalo's blizzard, weather remains a concern when planning these games. Who can forget the NHL Outdoors at Lake Tahoe two-game series in February 2021? A nine-hour delay in the first contest was caused by mushy ice partially melted by temperatures hovering around the freezing mark.
The rainy, cold Pacific Northwest winters are why Seattle has never hosted a Super Bowl, and why it initially seemed this city had no chance at an NHL outdoor event. Even drizzling rain is potentially worse for NHL ice conditions than heat or snow.
NHL commissioner Gary Bettman visited Seattle in January 2019 just weeks after the Kraken franchise was awarded and was asked about an outdoor game here.
"There are two things that are a problem for us with outdoor games ... sun glare — well, that's not a problem here — and rain," Bettman said. "We can play in snow, but rain's a problem. So, we're going to have to study whether or not it's feasible."
When it was suggested to him that T-Mobile Park had a retractable roof, Bettman quipped: "But then it's not an outdoor game."
Back then, Bettman wasn't even five years removed from the March 2014 debacle at B.C. Place Stadium in British Columbia, where the Heritage Classic was played under a closed retractable roof because of rain.
Bettman has since come around, largely due to the league feeling T-Mobile's design already has enough outdoor feel around its open side walls even with the roof closed. And that roof has been closed all week, enabling for an easier rink setup amid rainy conditions than the NHL is typically used to.
And if it rains Monday — which isn't in the forecast — NHL chief content officer Steve Mayer has said a panel of the retractable roof could cover the rink while the rest stays open.
But the whole point of outdoor hockey is — naturally — playing outside. It reverts to the sport's origins of outdoor "shinny" on frozen Canadian ponds more than 150 years ago while rekindling memories among players of youth spent at neighborhood backyard or street-corner rinks.
"I got to go home for Christmas a few days ago and play outside with my kids and some of the neighbors," Eberle said, adding he'd gone out nightly in his youth to play pond hockey. "I did that a ton. That's kind of where you develop your craft really. You get to play outside, and it's just the pure joy of hockey."
Eberle and teammate Jared McCann were at T-Mobile Park on Thursday for a quick tour of the newly installed rink. McCann remembers his father, Matt, building him an outdoor rink behind his Stratford, Ontario, home every winter.
"We had this little area back on the farm where the water would kind of pool, it would collect," McCann said. "And if it got cold enough it would freeze. So we'd go out there, and my old man was in construction for a long time. So I was able to have an outdoor rink me and my family would always skate on. It brings back a lot of great memories."
The onset of professional hockey in the early 1900s led to the construction of many indoor rinks. Montreal opened the world's first indoor facility with the Victoria Skating Rink in 1875, and it played host to the first Stanley Cup playoff games in 1894 — back then contested by amateur teams.
Interestingly, the 4,000-seat Seattle Ice Arena, home to the Seattle Metropolitans of the Pacific Coast Hockey Association starting in 1915, was North America's first indoor facility with an artificial ice refrigeration system. Otherwise, indoor rinks often got too warm at times, and ice conditions deteriorated quickly.
"Before that, teams were at the mercy of the weather and whether it would be cold enough," said local author Kevin Ticen, who just rereleased an updated edition through Clyde Hill Publishing — with photographs and new chapter introductions — of his 2019 book "When It Mattered Most" about the Metropolitans. "So in the 1920 Stanley Cup Final, the Metropolitans go back to Ottawa to play, and it's warm. The ice is slushy, and it's just really bad conditions for a fast, athletic team. So it was still like in football stadiums or for baseball where weather really impacted the quality of [indoor hockey] play."
Ticen noted the Winter Classic will be played adjacent to a street named after legendary Seattle sports writer Royal Brougham, who also was the Metropolitans' official scorekeeper. And he noted that a team from a city pioneering indoor rink refrigeration "is now playing outdoors where they wouldn't have needed it."
Of course, the Metropolitans were a PCHA expansion squad that won a Stanley Cup in 1917. The Kraken and Golden Knights are the NHL's two most recent expansion teams, with Vegas winning the Cup its sixth season last spring.
Las Vegas is also where the NHL first experimented with an outdoor game involving two of its teams, playing a 1991 preseason affair between the Los Angeles Kings and New York Rangers in a parking lot rink at Caesar's Palace. The ice held despite temperatures reaching 85 degrees, and the game launched a series of NHL initiatives in Las Vegas that led to Hollywood producer Jerry Bruckheimer and billionaire Caesar's owner David Bonderman initially seeking a team there before bringing the Kraken to the Emerald City.
"The NHL does an amazing job each year," McCann said. "It keeps getting better and better, and obviously we have the facility here at T-Mobile with the roof and everything to try to host something that much more special. We're just going to try to make the most of it."
