PHILADELPHIA — Look, something’s amiss when you’re in hockey town, the Stanley Cup is months away, the leaves are barely falling — and yet the NHL Frozen Frenzy night is being unleashed smack in the middle of the World Series. Yes, 2025-26 season. Yes, all 32 teams taking to the ice on Tuesday — while baseball fans are still glued to city duels for the Fall Classic. It’s a scheduling move that reeks of distraction, mis-planning and the kind of leadership that frequently nods and smiles rather than thinks.
The league hyped it as a “hockey Christmas” for fans, a triple-header on ESPN plus a whip-around app show for the rest of the games. Fine, what’s not fine: launching this TV event when the sport’s other major league spectacle, the World Series, is commanding every living room, every bar, every sports-fan heartbeat. The timing is clumsy. The window is crowded. The decision shows that Gary Bettman and his team dropped the puck without checking the boards.
In the press, Bettman praised the event, saying it was about building the buzz, getting the fans locked in early, showing hockey’s full roster of teams in one night. But guess what? Fans are already consumed by the postseason baseball drama. The NHL could have waited a week, cleared the calendar, guaranteed prime space — instead it chose the collision course. That’s not bold. That’s lazy.
When the marquee outdoor games and special events can’t even respect the broader sports ecosystem, you have to question whether the league’s big-picture thinking is functioning. Frozen Frenzy is fine in concept — great, even — but in execution it’s bungled. When your scheduling forces cross-sport competition for attention rather than creating synergy, you lose. You lose viewers. You lose momentum.
Worse: games on this night are staggered from 6 p.m. ET to 11 p.m. ET, yet many fans still face the fatigue of switching from World Series to arena cam to puck drop. The network show may be slick, the prod-team tight, but the audience is split. Baseball fans remain tuned into their drama. Hockey fans might show up, but the walk-in numbers and the “event” feel — diluted. Communications and marketing will shout about all-32-teams in action; what they won’t highlight is the distraction factor. Bettman’s office could have avoided this. It didn’t.
There’s a simple fix: move the event back one week. Let the World Series conclude, let the sports calendar breathe, then let the league launch its showcase with no noise. Instead, we get an obvious overlap. It’s not strategy. It’s scheduling for scheduling’s sake. It damages brand. It dilutes uniqueness. It wastes what should be a signature moment in the season.
We’ve seen Bettman handle bigger cliffs: Olympic negotiations, expansion talks, outdoor-game logistics. Yet here’s something he should have nailed — scheduling — and he didn’t. If you want to grow the game, you respect timing. You respect competition in the media landscape. You respect the fan’s attention. This time, the NHL looked like it forgot all of that.
So go ahead, the games do kick off Tuesday. The triple-header will air. The star players will shine. The stats will get logged. But somewhere in the boardroom someone should be wearing a dunce cap. Because when your event collides with the Fall Classic and ends up splitting the audience, it’s not smart. It’s sloppy. And when the league commissioner oversees the moment that should have been pristine and simply drops the puck early, you start to worry whether the leadership is really paying attention.
Hockey deserves better than this. The Frozen Frenzy deserves the spotlight, not the back-seat. The fans deserve a date they can rally around, not one they share with baseball’s big stage. Somewhere along the way, someone dropped the clock — and for the league, that’s on Gary Bettman.
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