Near the end of the 2026 Winter Classic between the New York Rangers and Florida Panthers, a user posted a screenshot on NASCAR Reddit that appeared to be an NHL.com contact page promoting the 2027 event.
The image revealed that the 2027 Winter Classic would be held at Bristol Motor Speedway and that the Nashville Predators and Carolina Hurricanes would play each other on January 2.
The report made sense as Bristol Motor Speedway recently hosted the 2025 Speedway Classic between the Atlanta Braves and Cincinnati Reds. The event broke the MLB’s regular-season attendance record with 91,032 tickets sold. Bristol hosted officials from the NHL and other sports at the event.
“We believe we will continue to show that Bristol Motor Speedway is a facility for lots of different types of events,” Bristol Motor Speedway president Jerry Caldwell told Sportico then. “You’ve got hockey and soccer that both make sense. If you want a facility that has a big open space that you can put a playing surface down…and then want to be able to host some of the largest crowds in the country, then Bristol is going to be the place to at least explore for that.”
While an outdoor hockey game could happen at Bristol in the future, the 0.533-mile-long oval will not host the event in 2027, per NASCAR’s preeminent reporter, FOX’s Bob Pockrass.
“BMS is always interested in unique large-scale events,” Caldwell told Pockrass on Saturday. “The reports of a scheduled event with NHL at BMS are inaccurate, but we do look forward to welcoming fans back to The Last Great Colosseum for the Food City 500 on Sun., April 12.”
The reporting was then followed up by The Athletic’s Jordan Bianchi and Predators beat reporter Alex Daugherty from The Tennessean.
This afternoon, a NASCAR Reddit moderator also took down the image, explaining that “we currently have a quite reputable report that this statement is premature at best, and perhaps false.”
If “The Last Great Coliseum” eventually hosted an outdoor game, the Washington Capitals could be considered, given their proximity (397 miles away). The track is located just a few miles away from the city of Bristol, which sits on the state line of Virginia and Tennessee. For fans in Maryland and Northern Virginia, the trip is a straight shot down Route 81.
Bristol Motor Speedway has a capacity of 146,000 people for races, as of 2021. If all those seats were filled for a potential hockey event, the game would destroy the NHL’s previous attendance record of 104,173, set at the 2014 NHL Winter Classic when the Toronto Maple Leafs played the Detroit Red Wings at Michigan Stadium.
The race track previously hosted a college football game between local universities, Tennessee and Virginia Tech, in 2016. The matchup between the two programs broke the college football attendance record with more than 157,000 people attending.
