NHL's holiday on ice amid balmy Miami's swaying palm trees

WHEN THE MIAMI MARLINS made a bid to host the NHL's annual Winter Classic at their stadium, LoanDepot Park, they knew they would have to overcome one major obstacle in pitching the idea: Florida's warm and sunny weather. Rather than ignore the obvious hurdle of hosting the league's signature outdoor winter hockey event in the tropics, the team decided to go all in on the theme and submitted a proposal entitled "Miami Ice," a play on the hit 1980s TV show "Miami Vice."

"We're not shy of the fact that this is in South Florida. I think that's what makes this unique and novel," said Anthony Favata, vice president of operations and events for the Marlins. "The vibrancy of the colors of South Beach, of the palm trees, and this juxtaposition of warm weather versus winter. So, we're very much leaning into that."

The big question was whether South Florida's balmy weather and professional-quality ice hockey could peacefully coexist.

After years of discussions and multiple visits to LoanDepot Park, the league awarded the 2026 Winter Classic to the Marlins, confident that engineers could build an outdoor hockey rink in sunny Miami where the average temperature in January hovers around 70 degrees Fahrenheit.

Miami will likely have the warmest temperature at the 8 p.m. ET puck drop in the history of the Winter Classic, where the average temperature for all previous sites at puck drop was 33 degrees, but the league and Marlins say they have a plan to ensure the ice will be ready to go on game day. The game will air on TNT.

To build the rink, NHL engineers planned to use multiple generators, two 18-wheeler coolant trucks, approximately 20,000 gallons of water and round-the-clock care starting in mid-December. Compared to other outdoor rinks they've built in much colder climates, they said, this Miami build was easier to plan and execute.

The idea to hold a Winter Classic in Florida started years ago, according to Steve Mayer, president of NHL events and content. League officials first considered hosting an all-Florida franchise matchup between the Tampa Bay Lightning and Florida Panthers. Ultimately, officials said they decided two games were better than one and awarded the Winter Classic to the Panthers, who will play the New York Rangers in Miami on Friday, and the Stadium Series to the Lightning, who will play the Boston Bruins at Raymond James Stadium in Tampa on Feb. 1.

Mayer described it with a "Field of Dreams" analogy. "This is an incredible sports story where you can go into a place that has never really participated [in hockey], never really been exposed to a sport, and then build it and they will come," Mayer said, adding that filling a single arena would be an achievement. "And now we're filling two stadiums that are huge, just full of Panther fans and Lightning fans."

Mayer called Florida the new "hotbed of hockey." A Florida team has played in the last six Stanley Cup Final series. The Panthers are the reigning back-to-back champions, having won in 2024 and 2025. The Lightning won back-to-back titles in 2020 and 2021. Additionally, league officials say youth hockey participation rates had increased by 212% since the NHL first expanded into Florida in the 1990s, and for the seventh straight season, there are at least eight Florida-born players playing in the league. Fifteen years ago, there had never been more than two players in the same season from the state.

LOANDEPOT PARK'S retractable roof, which will help control the conditions until game day, is a major reason why Florida's heat isn't such a big concern, event planners told ESPN.

"The greatest enemy of the ice is wind and sun," said Jorge Pinoncély, of Industrial Frigo, a winter entertainment company that has built more than 500 outdoor ice rinks in the U.S. and is unaffiliated with the NHL.

The evening start time means direct sunlight won't be a concern once the roof is retracted. But Pinoncély cautioned that wind could be an issue.

University of Miami atmospheric sciences professor Paquita Zuidema likened the effects of wind on an ice rink to a block of ice sitting in a backyard.

"The ice will be constantly cooling the air above it," helping keep the surface temperature low, Zuidema said. But wind "will keep removing that cold pool of air. So the ice will need to work harder to cool off that air layer."

The optimum temperature for ice level -- the pocket of air above the ice and inside the glass -- on game day is approximately 60 degrees, said Derek King, the NHL's vice president of facilities and hockey operations.

"Inside the glass is really important. We know, though, that we don't have a lot of control over that," he said. "So we'll make that [ice] sheet as cold as we can to kind of control that area, and then we'll monitor our temperatures."

The league refined the process of building a rink with each of the 43 outdoor games held since 2003. From start to finish, it takes two weeks and about 100 people to create the Winter Classic's on-field build out of the hockey rink, but only 24 for the ice crew according to King.

Work began as soon as the NHL's two 18-wheeler mobile refrigeration units arrived at LoanDepot Park from Canada, where they are stored. In cold-weather builds such as Chicago or Minneapolis, the NHL typically needs just one mobile refrigeration unit, but for Miami the league needed two.

Workers ran pipes that carried a mixture of 40% glycol and 60% water from the refrigeration trucks to the baseball field. At the same time, they prepped the field by covering approximately 80% of it with an armored subfloor before building a stage for the rink. Staff used the closed roof to help keep the indoor temperature controlled to 60 degrees.

With the foundation complete, workers laid down aluminum panels that connect to the pipes channeling the glycol mix. That mix has a freezing temperature lower than water and allows the metal plates to get colder than the 32 degrees needed to freeze water.

It typically takes four to five days to lay the pipes and build the foundation, rink and boards, according to King. Next comes a process where workers use ice and water to fill gaps -- much like grouting between tiles -- to create the smoothest-possible surface.

From there, teams finally begin to make the ice by slowly spraying the rink with water over the course of several days, gradually building the sheet of ice to get to an eventual game-time thickness of 2 to 2.5 inches and a surface temperature of 25 degrees.

During this process, they paint the rink white and add logos and lines before the top layer of ice is added.

Once completed in Miami, the Panthers and Rangers got practice time. The league planned to use any remaining time left to work out any kinks and make sure the ice was ready for Friday's game day.

BY "TAKING MOTHER NATURE out of the equation," King said, the build can be easier compared to colder venues such as Nashville in 2022, when rain created more than 4 inches of ice by game day, or during the 2025 Stadium Series in Columbus, where wind and snow interrupted the build.

But warmer venues aren't hazard-free. Six days before the 2020 Winter Classic at the Cotton Bowl in Dallas, heavy rain and warm weather melted the ice, forcing workers to restart the layering process.

When the league finally opens the roof in Miami, King said his team will be prepared to adapt to weather conditions.

"We just need to look at how we deal with the ice on game day. Are we going to limit the amount of time we're going to flood? Are we going to shave off more ice and kind of deal with what we know we can deal with?" King said. "So control stuff we can control and really let Mother Nature set in."

But King admits there was one unusual challenge for his team ahead of the warm weather build: what to wear.

"We're not all bundled up in heavy coats and stuff like that, trying to stay warm," said King, who is based in Canada and looked forward to the T-shirt weather of Florida. "We've all had to kind of rethink our outfitting for this build because we're going to be in Miami."