Fans warming to charms of big league ice hockey

The National Hockey League kicked off 2014 with the biggest ice hockey bash ever on Wednesday, firing the opening salvo in a “shock-and-awe” campaign designed to turn casual fans into avid ones.

An announced record hockey crowd of 105,491 braved brutal conditions to fill massive Michigan Stadium for the NHL’s outdoor Winter Classic as the Toronto Maple Leafs clinched a 3-2 shootout win over the Detroit Red Wings.

The game-time temperate was -11C with a wind chill of zero, in contrast to the average temperature of the previous five Winter Classics which was 4C, and an average attendance of 53,045.

Over the next three months, the NHL will play outdoor games from Los Angeles to New York featuring iconic franchises in historic settings in an unprecedented push to claim more ground in an escalating battle for a larger slice of the North American sporting landscape.

Emboldened by a new 12-year $5.2 billion (€3.8bn) Canadian television rights deal, and increasing talk of expansion, a bullish NHL commissioner Gary Bettman has embarked on what one sport marketing expert described as a campaign of “shock-and-awe”.

Putting the Winter Classic in “the Big House” provided the wow factor the NHL was looking for to kick off the New Year but it marked just the start of the league’s marketing blitz.

The Winter Classic will be followed by two games at Yankee Stadium later this month and another in LA before the NHL returns to the world’s biggest sporting stage at the Sochi Olympics.

Coming out of Russia, the NHL will try to stay in the spotlight with outdoor contests in Vancouver and Chicago that the league hopes will add to the marketing momentum heading into the Stanley Cup play-offs.

“I hate to use military terms but this really is a sort of shock-and-awe campaign,” Paul Swangard, said managing director, Warsaw Sports Marketing Center at the University of Oregon.

“We are going to have these incredible interesting outdoor experiences with a lot of interesting storylines, we are sending them to Sochi and all those athletes are going to come back and the casual fan gets exposed.”