The NHL Winter Classic is an annual event held by the National Hockey League (NHL) on or around New Year's Day in which a regular-season hockey game is played outdoors, in an area hosted by an NHL team. The first outdoor NHL regular season game was the 2003 Heritage Classic held in Edmonton between Edmonton and Montreal. The first Winter Classic was held in 2008. The event featured only American teams for its first five years. The 2014 game will feature its first Canadian team, as the Toronto Maple Leafs are scheduled to play against the Detroit Red Wings. The Canadian counterpart to the NHL's American Winter Classic series is the NHL's Canadian Heritage Classic series.
Read more about NHL Winter Classic: List of NHL Winter Classics, History, List of NHL Outdoor Games, Notes, Impact, Ratings, Future Sites, See Also
Famous quotes containing the words winter and/or classic:
“I am less affected by their heroism who stood up for half an hour in the front line at Buena Vista, than by the steady and cheerful valor of the men who inhabit the snow-plow for their winter quarters; who have not merely the three-o’-clock-in-the-morning courage, which Bonaparte thought was the rarest, but whose courage does not go to rest so early, who go to sleep only when the storm sleeps or the sinews of their iron steed are frozen.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The great British Library—an immense collection of volumes of all ages and languages, many of which are now forgotten, and most of which are seldom read: one of these sequestered pools of obsolete literature to which modern authors repair, and draw buckets full of classic lore, or “pure English, undefiled” wherewith to swell their own scanty rills of thought.”
—Washington Irving (1783–1859)