2017 NHL Winter Classic
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| Date | January 2, 2017 | |||||||||||||||
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| Arena | Busch Stadium | |||||||||||||||
| City | St. Louis, Missouri | |||||||||||||||
| Attendance | 46,556 | |||||||||||||||
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The 2017 NHL Winter Classic (officially the 2017 Bridgestone NHL Winter Classic) was a regular-season outdoor National Hockey League (NHL) game that was held on January 2, 2017. The game featured the St. Louis Blues taking on the Chicago Blackhawks at Busch Stadium, home of Major League Baseball's St. Louis Cardinals. The game was announced on March 9, 2016, after news of the matchup had been leaked on February 7 before the details had been finalized, and was one of four outdoor regular-season games during the 2016–17 NHL season.
St. Louis had expressed interest in an outdoor game as early as 2011, with this matchup being their first.
The Blackhawks played in their third Winter Classic, following appearances in 2009 and 2015; with the appearance, the Blackhawks will have appeared in the contest more times than any other team. It is also the fourth consecutive year (and fifth overall) in which the Blackhawks play an outdoor game, having also played the 2014 and 2016 Stadium Series in addition to the 2015 and 2017 Winter Classics.
This matchup was of the storied Blackhawks–Blues rivalry, both members of the NHL's Central Division. The game was held in St. Louis to mark the 50th anniversary of the Great Expansion of 1967, in which the Blues, Pittsburgh Penguins, Philadelphia Flyers, Los Angeles Kings, Minnesota North Stars (which became the Dallas Stars in 1993) and California Golden Seals (who merged with the North Stars in 1978; the San Jose Sharks were then spun off from the North Stars in 1991) were formed, doubling the league's size. The Flyers and Penguins were another candidate for the 2017 Winter Classic, but scheduling conflicts with the National Football League in both cities and winterization concerns regarding Beaver Stadium (a neutral site stadium discussed as another possibility for a Flyers–Penguins outdoor contest) led St. Louis to be chosen instead. St. Louis has no NFL or major college team, and even when it did, the Rams (who left in January 2016 for Los Angeles) played in an indoor dome; Busch Stadium, a baseball venue, is the city's only sufficiently sized outdoor stadium. The Penguins and Flyers will instead play a Stadium Series game in Pittsburgh later in 2017.
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