2011 NHL Winter Classic
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| Date | January 1, 2011 | |||||||||||||||
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| Arena | Heinz Field | |||||||||||||||
| City | Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania | |||||||||||||||
| Attendance | 68,111 | |||||||||||||||
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The 2011 NHL Winter Classic (known via corporate sponsorship as the Bridgestone NHL Winter Classic) was an outdoor regular season National Hockey League (NHL) game played on January 1, 2011, at Heinz Field in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The visiting Washington Capitals defeated the Pittsburgh Penguins, 3–1. The game, rescheduled from its original 1:00 p.m. ET start time to 8:00 p.m. due to weather concerns, was telecast on NBC in the United States, and CBC (English) and RDS (French) in Canada. Pittsburgh native Jackie Evancho performed the Star Spangled Banner and Pittsburgh sports legends Mario Lemieux, Franco Harris and Jerome Bettis presided over the ceremonial dropping of the puck, and during the second intermission Harris and Bettis hosted a fan event at the outside rink.
The 2011 Winter Classic was the second time the Penguins participated in an outdoor NHL game; the team previously visited the Buffalo Sabres for the inaugural Winter Classic in 2008. Most notably, the Classic pitted two recent number-one draft picks against each other: Capitals winger Alexander Ovechkin (2004) and Penguins center Sidney Crosby (2005); both players entered the league in the same year, 2005, due to the 2004–05 NHL lockout and contributed to a rivalry between the two teams that has been growing since the early 1990s.
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