As the puck drops from Wrigley Field in Chicago on this year’s edition of the NHL Winter Classic, the league’s decision to move the game from its traditional New Year’s Day to the day before on New Year’s Eve is being met with wary attention from sports page observers.

Prior to this season, all 15 editions of the Winter Classic were played on New Year’s Day, with the exception of three cases in which January 1 fell on a Sunday. In these cases, the NHL played its Winter Classic on January 2nd to avoid NFL competition.

But with New Year’s Day adding even more competition to sports fans and the expanded College Football Playoff set to play three of its quarterfinal games on that day, the NHL made the seemingly wise decision to change its schedule. Of course there will still be football competitions. 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 when the first quarterfinal game between Penn State and Boise State begins at 7:30 p.m. ET.

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

Last year, the Winter Classic was just the seventh most-watched NHL game of the year, according to SMW, behind five games on ABC and the debut of young phenom Connor Bedard.

Needless to say, a change was needed for the Winter Classic. But will taking the game up a notch one day be proven to help increase viewership? There will certainly be less competition. Instead of competing against one of the most-watched days in college football every year, the Winter Classic will compete against a smaller bowl and a full slate of regular-season NHL and NBA games.

The teams represented in this year’s game could slow potential growth, despite it being a historic rivalry. Bedard’s struggling Chicago Blackhawks face a mediocre St. Louis Blues team. While some may tune in to see Bedard, and Chicago is a big media market, it’s unlikely that teams themselves will be able to call the shots this year.

The real problem for the Winter Classic appears to be the move from broadcast to cable. As we have seen time and time again in live sports, broadcast reach can significantly improve the viewership of a given event. Look no further than a handful of regular old midseason games on ABC that topped the Winter Classic last year.

While the New Year’s Eve postponement could give this year’s edition of the Winter Classic a slight increase over last year’s record low of 1.1 million viewers, it is unlikely to cause the NHL’s season-long viewership to remain the same as it was before the postponement would change significantly to the cable.

(Sports Media Watch)