The NHL’s Winter Classic continues to find itself in the viewership doldrums.

For the second-consecutive year, the Winter Classic failed to crack the seven-figure audience threshold after having surpasses one million viewers every year since its debut in 2008.

Friday’s game between the New York Rangers and Florida Panthers from LoanDepot Park in Miami averaged just 978,000 viewers across TNT and truTV, up 6% versus last year’s all-time low featuring the St. Louis Blues and Chicago Blackhawks from Wrigley Field (920,000 viewers), according to data from the TV Media Blog Substack. However, when accounting for Nielsen’s recent methodological changes, the 2026 edition of the Winter Classic would have finished significantly down from the 2025 game, all things being equal. The panel-only figure for the Rangers’ win clocks in at 823,000 viewers, which would indicate an 11% audience decline when using a standardized methodology.

No matter how you slice it, the numbers do not bode well for what used to be one of the NHL’s marquee regular-season events. Early in its history, the Winter Classic could command audiences above four million, well before Nielsen changes like the addition of out-of-home viewing measurements boosted viewership figures for live sports. In other words, it’s not crazy to say the last two audiences for the Winter Classic amount to approximately 20%, or less, of the audiences the event got in the first six or seven years of its existence.

To be fair, the Winter Classic moved from NBC to TNT in 2022. The reach that a broadcast network like NBC can provide compared to a cable channel like TNT cannot be overstated. But even still, TNT’s recent audiences are less than half of what NBC was drawing in its last couple of years airing the event (about three million in 2019 and about two million in 2020).

Friday’s audience has to be even more disappointing for the NHL when considering it tried something new this year: playing the game in a warm locale like Miami and shifting the date to avoid a busy New Year’s Day sports calendar.

Hockey on the beach doesn’t appear to be a selling point for fans, no matter what day it’s played.