EDMONTON– Ryan McLeod came out of the Edmonton Oilers locker room for practice Saturday, and it hit him – the cold, the scene. This was actually happening. He was going to participate in an outdoor NHL game for the first time.
“I’m super excited,” the striker said. “Growing up, I always wanted to do it.”
When the Oilers host the Calgary Flames in the 2023 Tim Hortons NHL Heritage Classic at Commonwealth Stadium on Sunday (7 p.m. ET; SN, TVAS, TBS, MAX), it will celebrate the 20th anniversary of the original Heritage Classic.
The Montreal Canadiens beat the Oilers 4-3 in front of a crowd of 57,167 in this same stadium on November 22, 2003. The idea was to remember the heritage of outdoor hockey, but at the time, no one wanted to play in the stadium. NHL outdoors.
No one had really done it, except for a preseason game between the Los Angeles Kings and the New York Rangers in the parking lot of Caesars Palace in Las Vegas on September 27, 1991. The original Heritage Classic was the first time the NHL had played a regular season game away in the modern era.
Today, a generation has grown up watching outdoor NHL games. They alone are part of the NHL dream.
‘Absolutely,’ said Oilers forward Connor Brown, who will be playing his third outdoor game in the NHL. “Yeah.”
This is the legacy of the original Heritage Classic.
This led to the original Winter Classic, a 2–1 shootout victory by the Pittsburgh Penguins over the Buffalo Sabers in front of 71,217 spectators at Ralph Wilson Stadium in Orchard Park, New York, on January 1, 2008.
This led to much more. The NHL played 37 outdoor games at various venues, involving 934 players and attracting 1,851,642 spectators. That’s an average of 52,904 fans per game (not including the two games played without fans on television during the 2021 NHL Outdoors in Lake Tahoe during the COVID-19 pandemic).
Penguins center Sidney Crosby remembers watching the original Heritage Classic on TV when he was 16 – the official temperature of 0 degrees Fahrenheit during puck drop, Canadiens goaltender Jose Theodore wore a toque on his mask – and to have been able to play the original Winter Classic himself. He scored the winning goal in a shootout in the snow.
“It looked like these guys had a great time,” Crosby said, “and it was exciting for us to have the opportunity to play outside for the first time for a lot of us at this level.
