The NHL put every one of its 32 teams on the ice on Tuesday night, 16 games staggered 15 minutes apart across five hours of continuous hockey. Jesse Marshall of The Athletic decided to run a small experiment on it.
“Just out of curiosity, I asked several non-NHL but sports fan friends of mine if they were aware today was the Frozen Frenzy, and not a single one knew what I was talking about,” Marshall wrote.
His conclusion was blunt.
“The league is only talking to itself. Unless you are playing fantasy, or seeking out hockey coverage, you wouldn’t even know this exists. There is zero mainstream cross-promotion,” he wrote.
What is the NHL Frozen Frenzy?
Puck drops begin at 6 p.m. ET and roll on every quarter of an hour until the last game starts at 11, with ESPN2 running a whip-around show hosted by John Buccigross and Kevin Weekes that bounces between all of them. Now in its fourth year, it produced 109 goals last season, the third-highest total on any single day in league history.
The complaint isn’t with the concept. Ryan Whitney, who played 12 NHL seasons and now co-hosts Spittin’ Chiclets, enjoyed the night itself while making precisely the same point about how it was sold.
“Frozen Frenzy is amazing. Would have been nice to hear about it before today but here we are and it’s buzzing,” Whitney wrote.
The problem is with everything around it.
“Dropping 16 games on a random Tuesday in mid-October makes the entire experience feel like an afterthought,” Marshall wrote. “We’ve got East Coast fans going into midnight finishes and West Coast fans trying to catch 3:00 PM starts during work. Move it to a Saturday after college football!”
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He isn’t alone. Writing at Union and Blue, Curtis Deem called it a great idea that is poorly executed, pointing at 6:15 puck drops on a weeknight and questioning the matchups the league chose to showcase. Kraken at Flyers, Canucks at Islanders and Panthers at Blue Jackets are not games anyone outside those markets was clearing an evening for.
The criticism has followed the event since it started. When the first Frozen Frenzy launched in October 2023, it went head to head with a Game 7 in the National League Championship Series and the opening night of the NBA season, prompting writer Adam Gretz to ask why the league wasn’t using it to open its own season, and why it only happened once a year.
ESPN’s production featured a tripleheader of Devils-Red Wings, Avalanche-Stars and Bruins-Sharks, with Ray Ferraro, Erik Johnson and A.J. Mleczko among the analysts on the calls.
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