Taking the Fight Outside

On the 9th February, the NHL officially announced one of the worst kept secrets this season. The 2013 Bridgestone NHL Winter Classic will be fought out between the Detroit Red Wings and the Toronto Maple Leafs, and will be one for the record books, as it is held in Michigan Stadium.

The Winter Classic has quickly become the centrepiece event in the NHL regular season, ever since Buffalo and Pittsburgh stepped out into Ralph Wilson Stadium on New Years Day 2008. The continual success of this event year on year, has cemented this in as an annual event.

Puck drops for Going Shelf

Welcome to the beginning of this blog, which I hope will provide you with some interesting takes on how the sport of hockey is being marketed, to both North American, and International markets. I have started this blog because, I have a passion for sports marketing from when I attended university and studied the academic side of this field, and also because I love hockey and find the way it is distributed and marketed to be both interesting as a mass market, and niche sport.

Hockey was not a sport that I was brought up with, I am from the UK, so my awareness of the sport as a child was minimal. I guess the first real contact I had with the sport, was when I was bought a copy of NHL 2003, and I found it hugely entertaining to hit players down to the ice and score a hell of a lot of goals (on easy mode). This basic knowledge, given to me by EA Sports, was all I had until I was 19 and left my homeland for the summer, to work at a summer camp in New York.