The Rangers’ 2025-26 schedule will include another outdoor game, with the Blueshirts set to face the Panthers at the Marlins’ loanDepot park on Jan. 2, the team announced.
It’ll mark their sixth appearance in an outdoor game, with the most recent one occurring last year when the Rangers faced the Islanders at MetLife Stadium in the NHL’s Stadium Series and escaped with a thrilling overtime win. The Blueshirts are 5-0 in their history of outdoor games.
This one, though, will be different, with Florida hosting the two southernmost outdoor games in league history, according to the Panthers.
The Rangers faced the Panthers in the 2024 Eastern Conference Final. Charles Wenzelberg/New York PostThe Lighting will host the Bruins on Feb. 1 in another outdoor game next season.
It won’t be the NHL’s first attempt at hosting an outdoor game in warmer weather, as Dodger Stadium hosted an outdoor game in 2014 that, at the time, set the record for warmest temperature for a regular-season outdoor game at 62 degrees.
The Avalanche’s game against the Red Wings two years later, though, started in 65 degrees to break that mark.
And when the NHL hosted two outdoor games in Lake Tahoe in 2021, the first one between the Golden Knights and Colorado was delayed eight hours when the sun led to ice problems.
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That prompted the league to bump the start time of the second game — between the Bruins and the Flyers the next day — back more than five hours.
The Rangers, here at the 2024 Stadium Series, are 5-0 outdoors. Carlos Toro / New York Post“Stanley Cups, strings of sellouts and the exponential growth of youth and high school hockey throughout the state have demonstrated that Florida is a hockey hotbed,” NHL commissioner Gary Bettman said in a statement. “Outdoor NHL games in the Sunshine State? Never let it be said that our League isn’t willing to accept a challenge.”
The Rangers made their outdoor debut in January 2012 with a win against the Flyers at Citizens Bank Park before returning two years later with a convincing 7-3 win against the Devils at Yankee Stadium.
Three days after the New Jersey game, the Blueshirts faced the Islanders in The Bronx, too, and they defeated the Sabres in 2018 at Citi Field, too, before the thriller in East Rutherford last season.
