The National Hockey League has unveiled an illustrated preview of how Wrigley Field will be set up for the upcoming 2025 NHL Winter Classic, featuring the Chicago Blackhawks and St. Louis Blues playing on New Year’s Eve.
Wrigley Field, home of Major League Baseball’s Chicago Cubs, will host the outdoor game. This is the second time the historic stadium has hosted a Winter Classic, having done so for the second edition of this series back in 2009.
The NHL drew inspiration from Chicago’s iconic landmarks for the field and rink design. Designed in collaboration with Seattle-based Analog Heart, the set-up incorporates elements of the city’s bridge architecture, waterways, parks, and, of course, Wrigley Field’s signature brick and ivy-covered outfield walls.
The rink will be placed at the center of Wrigley Field atop a representation of the frozen Chicago River. Park sidewalks and bridges will surround the rink. Behind the team benches, exposed areas of frozen water will feature, while the left field area will host a separate ice sheet with local youth hockey players.
In right field, a celebration for New Year’s Eve with revellers in formal black-tie attire toasting the arrival of 2025 and a farewell to 2024.
A few weeks ago, the NHL released the uniform designs that the Blackhawks and Blues will wear for the game. The Blackhawks will again reach back into the wealth of options their ninety-eight-year-old wardrobe offers, while St Louis has gone in a different direction, choosing to honour their city’s hockey history instead.
It’s the first time the Blackhawks have worn red for an outdoor game. The design is inspired by the uniforms and crests they wore during the 1940s and ’50s. The Blackhawks will have several horizontal stripes across the chest in white and black, with a mishmash of team logos as the main crest.
The current Blackhawks’ primary logo is the centrepiece inside a roundel with four stars around the bottom, a nod to the Chicago city flag. The typeface within the roundel is a block, serif-style font, which is very close to what the crest featured on their uniforms of the late ’40s/early ’50s. You’ll note that the team name was presented as two words in those original photos; the team made their name a single word in 1986. On the back of the jersey, the player numbers incorporate a pinstripe pattern, a nod to the Chicago Cubs (perfect for a game at Wrigley Field).
The St. Louis Blues design dates back to the 1930s St. Louis Flyers, a team that predated the Blues’ time in the NHL by three decades. The striping across the chest, with the team name across it, is directly inspired by those Flyers uniforms. The colours blue and gold are not what the Flyers wore, but they, of course, are present here to tie this uniform to the Blues franchise.
The font for the ST LOUIS name across the chest is a modified version of that prototype Blues jersey, which also inspired their Reverse Retro 2.0 uniform back in 2022-23.
The 2025 NHL Winter Classic game will be played on New Year’s Eve at 5 p.m. ET and will air on TNT in the U.S., as well as Sportsnet and TVAS in Canada.
