NHL dropped the ball with this year’s Winter Classic

The Winter Classic has been the NHL’s signature regular season event since the 2007-08 season, taking a New Year’s Day game outdoors to various football and baseball stadiums across North America.

It has been one of the more brilliant marketing decisions the league has had, and it has given normally mundane mid-season games some added excitement.

But the league badly dropped the ball with this year’s game between the St. Louis Blues and Chicago Blackhawks at Wrigley Field, which St. Louis ended up winning, 6-2, thanks to a pair of goals from defenseman Cam Fowler.

It not only showed that outdoor games might be losing some of their luster, but that the NHL might actually be out of ideas when it comes to staging these games.

So what was the problem with this year’s matchup? There are so many that it is almost impossible to figure out where to begin.

But let’s start with the fact it was a matchup that almost nobody wanted. 

Not only are the Blues and Blackhawks two bottom-tier teams in the NHL this season (and everybody knew that coming in), the NHL has overly relied on the Blackhawks when it comes to its outdoor games in both the Winter Classic and the Stadium Series.  

Tuesday’s game was already the seventh outdoor game that Chicago has played in, and already its fourth Winter Classic. No team in the NHL has appeared in more. 

It is the second time Chicago has appeared in the game in the past seven years and third time in the past nine years. 

Fans of teams that have never had a chance to host an outdoor game — or play in an outdoor game — are simply tired of seeing Chicago always get placed in these games.

Especially when the Blackhawks have been a bottom-feeder in the standings since the start of the 2016-17 season. While they do have one of the game’s brightest young stars in second-year standout Connor Bedard, the team has stunk for years. 

Not only did the NHL recycle the Blackhawks, it also recycled this matchup as it is the second time the Blues and Blackhawks have played in the game. 

It also recycled going back to Wrigley Field, which has already hosted one of these games. 

The whole point of the Winter Classic was to give different teams and unique venues a chance to host games. Going back to a matchup you have already used, a stadium you have already used and one team that has already played in more outdoor games than anybody else just comes across as, for lack of a better word, lazy.

Alarmingly lazy. 

Even worse, the NHL took it upon itself to bury its own game in the schedule on a day that it is not normally played.

Prior to this season the Winter Classic has always been a standalone game for the league on New Year’s Day. Sure, it has to compete against college football, but the league has never been shy about that. This year, however, the league buried it on New Year’s Eve (when it still had to compete with college football) on a day where 12 other NHL games were taking place. 

The league did not even give it its own day and did almost nothing to market it to a more general audience. 

There is an argument to be made that the NHL has oversaturated its own market by having too many outdoor games over the years. But they can still be fun games for fans and there is still a lot of untapped potential for where they can take these games. 

But the NHL did not even try to explore any of that this season and just went back to its own safety nets. It was boring. It was bland. It was a game that nobody wanted. The league got the result it deserved.