NHL to Take It Outside ... Again

By Spencer Hall

While you were likely watching college football bowl games on January 1st, a small miracle happened in Buffalo, New York: 71,000 plus turned out in freezing weather and driving snow to watch the Buffalo Sabres play the Pittsburgh Penguins in the first outdoor NHL game in modern history, a 2-1 Penguins victory.

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The term miracle has to be used because, for the first time since hockey's rapid expansion into the United States in the early 1990s, the NHL held an event that caught the popular imagination -- and also happened to draw the largest ratings for an NHL game in 12 years.

Television ratings have been a bugbear for the network, especially because of their extremely localized fanbases: the pattern is that teams draw well locally but fail dismally on the national scale.

Given the abnormal national TV appeal of the Buffalo outdoor game, the NHL's riding the gambit for all its worth and is considering another game, this time in Chicago's Solider Field. If they try this in Florida with the Lightning or Panthers, I only ask that they don't put them on rollerblades. Because no one has any dignity on rollerblades.

> Blackhawks May Lace Up at Soldier Field | Chicago Sun-Times

This post originally appeared on the Sporting Blog. For more, see The Sporting Blog Archives.