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.”