NHL: Winter Classic-St. Louis Blues at Chicago Blackhawks Mandatory Credit: Daniel Bartel-Imagn Images

As the puck drops on this season’s edition of the NHL’s Winter Classic from Wrigley Field in Chicago, the league’s decision to move the game from its traditional New Year’s Day timeslot to a day prior on New Year’s Eve will be met with a watchful eye from sports viewership observers.

Prior to this season, all 15 editions of the Winter Classic have been contested on New Year’s Day, aside from three times where January 1 has fallen on a Sunday. In those instances, the NHL played its Winter Classic on January 2nd to avoid NFL competition.

But with New Year’s Day providing even stiffer competition for the eyeballs of sports fans now, with the expanded College Football Playoff set to play three of its quarterfinal matchups on the day, the NHL made the seemingly prudent decision to alter its schedule. There will still be football competition, sure. The Texas Bowl between Baylor and LSU will overlap with the start of the Winter Classic. But the NHL’s outdoor festivities should be over by the time the first quarterfinal game between Penn State and Boise State gets underway at 7:30 p.m. ET.

The last several years of the Winter Classic have not been friendly to the NHL from a ratings perspective. According to data from Jon Lewis of Sports Media Watch, since the game began airing on TNT in 2022, after airing on NBC from 2008 to 2020, the Winter Classic has averaged a meager 1.41 million viewers. During the NBC era, the game averaged 3.39 million viewers. That’s a problem for what has traditionally been the league’s most-watched game of the regular season.

Last year, per SMW, the Winter Classic ranked as just the seventh most-watched NHL game of the year behind five games on ABC and young phenom Connor Bedard’s debut.

Needless to say, a change was necessary for the Winter Classic. But will moving the game up one day demonstrably help its viewership cause? It will certainly give it less competition. Instead of going up against one of the most-watched days in college football each year, the Winter Classic will compete against one lesser bowl and a full slate of NHL and NBA regular season games.

The team’s featured in this year’s game might stunt some potential growth, despite being a historic rivalry. Bedard’s struggling Chicago Blackhawks are taking on a middling St. Louis Blues team. While some may tune in to see Bedard, and Chicago is a large media market, it’s unlikely that the teams themselves can be needle-movers this year.

The real struggle for the Winter Classic seems to be its move from broadcast to cable. As we’ve seen time and again when it comes to live sports, the reach of broadcast can greatly improve audience figures for a given event. Look no further than a handful of regular old midseason games on ABC out-rating the Winter Classic last year.

So while the move to New Year’s Eve may give this year’s edition of the Winter Classic a modest bump over last year’s record-low 1.1 million viewers, it’s unlikely to make any substantial difference for the NHL’s season-long viewership numbers as it had before moving to cable.

[Sports Media Watch]

About Drew Lerner

Drew Lerner is a staff writer for Awful Announcing and an aspiring cable subscriber. He previously covered sports media for Sports Media Watch. Future beat writer for the Oasis reunion tour.