Kraken, Golden Knights to play in front of sellout crowd at Winter Classic 

SEATTLE -- The Seattle Kraken and Vegas Golden Knights will play in front of a sellout crowd when they face off in the 2024 Discover NHL Winter Classic at T-Mobile Park on Monday (3 p.m. ET; MAX, truTV, TNT, SN, TVAS).

“This building will be completely filled come Monday,” NHL senior executive vice president and chief content officer Steve Mayer said Friday from the home of Major League Baseball’s Seattle Mariners. “This is what it’s going to be all about. We knew from the very beginning that this has become quite a hockey town. Seattle is amazing. What the Kraken have done in their first three years is really incredible and their team and the Vegas Golden Knights will be on full display on Monday and they’re playing to a sold-out crowd.”

Mayer estimated capacity will be close to 47,000 people, including some standing-room tickets. The game will feature the NHL’s two most recent expansion teams.

The Golden Knights joined the NHL in 2017 and won the Stanley Cup for the first time last season. The Kraken joined the League in 2021 and qualified for the Stanley Cup Playoffs for the first time last season.

This will be the first outdoor game for Seattle and the second for Vegas, which played the Colorado Avalanche in the NHL Outdoors at Lake Tahoe in 2021. There were no fans at the Lake Tahoe game because of the COVID-19 pandemic, so this will be the Golden Knights' first full-stadium game experience.

“The fact that the two last teams in are playing this game that has become our signature event says everything about the NHL right now,” Mayer said. “We’re growing. We’re going to new cities. These cities are taking to the NHL. We’re filling arenas. Now, we’re filling stadiums in those same cities, and to celebrate the last two teams in, one of which is the defending Stanley Cup champion, I think it says everything about the NHL.”

With the rink construction completed other than the continued buildup of the thickness of the ice, some finishing touches were being completed to the surrounding features on the field Friday.

The Seattle nautical theme includes oceanic topographical maps, docks and piers, which will serve as the entrance paths for the Kraken and Golden Knights to the rink, a boathouse in left field and shipwreck in center field in the grips of the tentacles of the mythical Kraken sea creature.

“We’re just thrilled with the way it looks, how everything is sort of coming to life, really playing into Seattle,” Mayer said. “We talked about it a lot. We sent out a rendering and it is always fun to see a rendering on paper actually become real, and that’s what we’re watching behind us.”

Mayer said T-Mobile Park’s retractable roof has been invaluable in keeping the build on schedule through the rain that is often part of Seattle’s weather.

“Given the weather we’ve had in the buildup to the game on Monday, if we were outdoors all the time, we would have been really close to maybe not being able to play a hockey game,” he said. “But having the roof closed for the majority of the time that we’ve been here, we were able build in great conditions.”

T-Mobile Park’s roof features three separate moveable panels that can cover the field but not enclose the ballpark, preserving the open-air feel, and also be deployed so the roof is partially open. Mayer said the forecast for Monday should allow for the roof to be completely open.

“Our goal has always been that we wanted to have the roof open,” Mayer said. “It’s an outdoor game. We had some secondary plans if it was raining and at what level it was going to rain to keep the roof open as much as we could. You can, obviously, open the roof in different degrees, and right now I see zero reason why the roof won’t be fully open on Monday.”

That will give the Kraken and Golden Knights the opportunity to get the complete outdoor-game experience. Regardless, the hockey world will see how Seattle has embraced the NHL.

Mayer believes that could lead to future NHL events in the city.

“I think we’re going to leave here on Monday and just say, ‘Wow. Look at how the Seattle market took to this game and how they’re behind the team,’” Mayer said. “And that leads to more.

“This is a great place. Hotels, restaurants, it’s a great place to be. It’s a great place for our sponsors, our other peripheral folks to want to visit. So, when we have all those things line up, it is a recipe to come back to do more, and there’s a lot more. We do have signature events that I’m sure everybody in Seattle would love to host: an All-Star Game, a Draft, and, down the road but the team has got to cooperate, the Stanley Cup Final.

“I do think this is a great place for us to do a big event. This absolutely proves it.”