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In 2021 at the NHL’s Board of Governors meeting in Palm Beach, Panthers GM Bill Zito and Lightning GM Julien BriseBois cornered an NHL executive with a proposal. “Right there on the spot, we went over to Steve and said, ‘Why don’t you let us play?’” Zito tells Front Office Sports.
The executive was Steve Mayer, president of the league’s events and content. Zito and BriseBois were lobbying for an outdoor game in Florida in which the Panthers and the Lightning would face off, an idea the two Sunshine State GMs had been kicking around for a while.
“You had a rink in Los Angeles. You had outdoor ice in Vegas. It’s not that much different—and by the way, we have a roof if something goes south,” Zito says he told Mayer at the Eau Palm Beach Hotel. “We kept hounding Steve, and eventually our whining paid off.”
On Jan. 2, the puck will drop on the first-ever outdoor NHL game in Florida. Loan Depot Park, home of the Marlins, will host the Rangers and Panthers for the 2026 NHL Winter Classic, one of the league’s two signature annual outdoor events. This will be the Panthers’ first game outside in the elements—though the “elements” in Florida won’t compare to prior Winter Classics like the snow-globe inaugural game in Buffalo (Ralph Wilson Stadium, 2008) or in Minneapolis (Target Field, 2022), where the puck dropped in minus-6-degree weather.
“We didn’t have to find Florida for an outdoor game, they found us,” NHL EVP of events Dean Matsuzaki tells FOS. Even before Zito and BriseBois approached Mayer in 2021, the Lightning had erected a highway billboard after the 2018 NHL All-Star Game that had a message for the league’s top brass en route to the airport: “Next time, let’s go outside the box,” alongside an idyllic rendering of what an outdoor game in Tampa could look like.
“Many years ago, the answer was, ‘Are you guys crazy? It’s Florida,’” says Matsuzaki. “But with some of the technology that has come a long way, with our ice plants and our ice making, and learning from other games we’ve done in warm weather… gradually, the confidence got more and more to further exploring going into Florida.”
The result of that exploration is the ice rink the NHL events team is currently constructing on the Loan Depot Park field. The key that has made this possible is the venue’s retractable roof, which will be closed for the three-week rink build. Barring unforeseen weather, the roof will open for puck drop at 8 p.m.
“Operationally, this is not the easiest of games that we’re going to pull off,” Mayer tells FOS. He says the league has spent a year getting comfortable with the ballpark and figuring out what it will uniquely need to hold an outdoor hockey game in a city where the average January temperature is about 76 degrees.
First, air conditioning in the 37,000-seat venue enables them to construct the rink in a temperature-controlled environment,with the roof closed; plus, the synthetic-turf field allows the ballpark to have a rink sit on it for weeks without destroying the baseball playing surface.
The NHL crew is also bringing two 300-ton ice plants—the refrigeration vehicles that cool ice rinks—instead of one, and also laying a thicker sheet of ice than usual. Following the warm streak and rain that challenged the rink assembly in Dallas’s Cotton Bowl in 2020, the league has also found new ways to push water off the ice instead of trying to freeze it in by using plow attachments on ice-crew vehicles to help temper excess moisture.
“We’ve learned over the years how to optimize our equipment, how to get better, to fight the environment a little bit,” says Matsuzaki. “We’ve developed systems, we’ve fine tuned them, and we hope that it’s all going to work out in Florida.”
The Marlins have also spent years pushing hard to land a Winter Classic. “They actually approached us quite aggressively, as well as the Panthers,” says Mayer.
In 2023, Marlins SVP of operations and events Anthony Favata contacted NHL president of business Keith Wachtell to pitch him on Loan Depot Park. “We reached out to the NHL and put our name in and said, ‘Hey, have you ever considered hockey in South Florida? How cool would that be?’” Favata tells FOS. Along with entering the formal RFP (request-for-propsals) process, the Marlins drew up a rendering of an ice rink on the field, and pushed to meet with the NHL a few times. “When the Panthers won the Stanley Cup again, we really blitzed it and said, ‘Now’s the time, right?’”
The NHL and the Marlins have worked closely together to address minute technical questions—Matsuzaki’s team spent 22 hours at the facility one day to study how the sun moved and set on the ballpark to calculate its impact on the ice—as well as prepare player amenities and solve puzzles such as where the 53-foot ice plants will park within the field’s tight footprint.
There are other logistics to reckon with, too. The Winter Classic comes right up against the New Year’s holiday—a time when Miami is teeming with tourists. The league started hotel planning earlier than usual to make sure the city could even accommodate an influx of hockey fans.
The game date has also changed. Last year’s Winter Classic at Wrigley Field was the first-ever slot on New Year’s Eve—a broadcast window that threaded a narrow needle between college football bowl games (and delivered record-low viewership). This year, the Winter Classic has been pushed to Jan. 2. Those hotel rooms are a factor—but even more so is the Orange Bowl, playing on New Year’s Day just 15 miles from Loan Depot Park.
Hockey in Florida will get two opportunities in the same season to show what it can do. Just one month after the Panthers host the Winter Classic, the Lightning will host the Bruins at Tampa’s Raymond James Stadium for the 2026 NHL Stadium Series game.
To get the rink right in the 65,000-seat NFL venue, Mayer says they will construct a tent over the stadium to allow the same type of climate-controlled environment the Loan Depot Park roof affords, and get to work with a similar technical plan from the Winter Classic.
It’s not just the technology—and the nagging from hockey’s top executives—that has brought outdoor games to Florida. The NHL says the success of both teams in the state has made bringing the league’s premier events—major business opportunities for local economies—an easy decision.
The past six Stanley Cup Finals have all featured Florida teams: The Lightning won consecutive league titles in 2020 and 2021, and played for the Cup again in again in 2022; the Panthers reached the Finals in 2023 and then captured the championship in both 2024 and 2025. The Panthers, says Mayer, have earned the Winter Classic: “They are first-class in every way.”
Each Winter Classic has had its calling card, Zito tells FOS—Buffalo’s “Hallmark Christmas” conditions; the white-out in Ann Arbor in 2014; the historic shine of Fenway Park and Wrigley Field in 2023 and 2025, respectively. He hopes Florida’s first outdoor game will be the biggest spectacle in the event’s history.
“I think fans are going to be more engaged than before and really excited to kind of peek in and see how it all plays out,” Zito says. “It’s kind of a bucket-list thing.”
