NHL Commish: Utah Did ‘Everything Right’ on Way to Winter Classic

The NHL’s selection of Utah and Rice-Eccles Stadium for the 2027 Winter Classic wasn’t just about finding another picturesque venue for the league’s showcase outdoor event. It was also a clear sign of league approval for what the Mammoth and owner Ryan Smith have achieved in less than two years. 

The league said that the Mammoth and Avalanche will play the next Winter Classic at Rice-Eccles Stadium, a 51,444-seat venue that is the home of the University of Utah football team and features a dramatic backdrop of the nearby Wasatch Mountains. Choosing that locale, and the Mammoth as the host team, arrives as the Smith and his organization have quickly and firmly established hockey in the Beehive State.

Since the spring 2024 move of the former Coyotes franchise to Utah, Smith and the Mammoth have:

• Sold out every game at Delta Center, though the venue continues to have blacked-out seats for hockey due to its original construction for basketball
• Begun a significant retrofitting of the arena this past summer to help address those sightline issues for hockey
• Developed a large-scale training facility in suburban Sandy, Utah, that will soon be joined by a parallel facility for the NBA’s Jazz, also owned by Smith
• Completed a renaming process from the temporary Utah Hockey Club moniker, pivoting after an original choice of Yeti ran into trademark issues
• Struck a large-scale deal with Live Nation Entertainment to build a companion music venue near the Delta Center 
• Developed a playoff contender that is just one standings point out of the final Western Conference wild-card slot, a marked turnaround after five years out of the postseason dating to the prior franchise tenure in Arizona

“If I would have suggested such an announcement three years ago, before this team even existed, people would have thought we were making it up,” said NHL commissioner Gary Bettman. “The fan response and the corporate response and the community response [to the Mammoth] has been incredible. We’re delighted to share this event with this great community.”

Bettman’s comments followed similar ones he made in October at an NHL Board of Governors meeting, where he said of Smith and the Mammoth, “They have done everything right, they’ve done everything first class, and everything they’ve accomplished in the time frame that they’d done it in is nothing short of remarkable.”

A specific date for the upcoming game has not yet been chosen, and could be influenced by scheduling for other adjacent events on the sports calendar, including the College Football Playoff and the next NFL season. 

Viewership Issues

The 2026 Winter Classic at Miami’s loanDepot park, meanwhile, struggled in generating broad viewership—despite significant success in and around the game itself, and more broadly, hockey in Florida.

The broadcast on TNT, truTV, and HBO Max averaged 1 million viewers. While that’s up 6% from last year’s all-time low for the event, it’s below historical norms for the event. This year’s increase could also be largely explained by the expansions in Nielsen’s methodologies to track viewership, including the arrival of Big Data + Panel. 

A runaway 5–1 victory by the Rangers over the Panthers also didn’t help, as third-period viewership fell 27% compared to the first two periods.

For the last two Winter Classics, the NHL moved away from its traditional New Year’s Day slot to avoid competition for viewers from college football. Those shifts may have ultimately hurt more than helped, as they moved away from a tradition now nearly two decades old. Bettman said a return to New Year’s Day for the Utah game next year is possible. 

A subsequent Jan. 4 game between the Penguins and Red Wings on ABC, a normal game that wasn’t part of any special event, averaged 1.6 million viewers.