St. Louis coach Jim Montgomery walked around before the Winter Classic. He looked at the growing crowd soaking in the festive atmosphere.

Winter Classic between the St. Louis Blues and Chicago Blackhawks was the 15th edition of the annual outdoor game held by the NHL. While the event is always a joyous occasion for the host city, the game between the Blues and Blackhawks caught the fewest number of eyes in its history.

The NHL may have saturated the market on outdoor games. With a one-to-two other games played outdoors each year in the NHL Stadium Series — in addition to the trends in broadcast television viewership, the Winter Classic has seen a steady decline over the past ten seasons.

There were several other factors that likely affected viewership. The game featured two of the league's lower-tier teams (in fact the Blackhawks have the NHL's worst record), it was a blowout — the Blues won 6-2 — and the event had been played at Wrigley before so that novelty factor was gone.

Classic audience dipped below 1 million viewers for the first time with its move to a New Year’s Eve late afternoon window this season. TNT and truTV drew just 920,000 viewers for the Blues-Blackhawks game from Wrigley Field with a 5pm ET start,

The Chicago Blackhawks are set to take on the St. Louis Blues in the 2025 NHL Discover Winter Classic. It's a matchup of two teams in very different places as o

Only 920,000 viewers watched the Hawks' blowout loss on Tuesday on TNT and TruTV, according to Sports Media Watch.