According to one of the partner businesses of the Vegas Golden Knights, that team, and the Seattle Kraken, have revealed their logos and color schemes for the 2024 NHL Winter Classic at T-Mobile Park. Well, maybe they haven’t revealed them, this sounds a bit like a clandestine operation.
William Hill, the official sportsbook of the VGK, says it has obtained the goods. Here are the images from their website:
The Kraken will apparently go with dark colors and a logo and jersey scheme reminiscent of the 1917 Stanley Cup champion Seattle Metropolitans while the Golden Knights will present softer colors and a modified “V” logo.
The NHL’s signature annual regular season event unfolds between the two clubs in exactly five months on New Years Day at the Seattle Mariners home venue.
The very first Winter Classic took place on an NFL football field in 2008 in Buffalo, New York between the Sabres and the visiting Pittsburgh Penguins. Sidney Crosby scored the game winner for the Penguins in a shoot-out.
The first NHL WC played at a ball park happened the very next year when the Chicago Blackhawks hosted the Detroit Red Wings at Wrigley Field. The Red Wings came from behind to win the game 6-4 with both teams wearing vintage sweater designs from the 1920’s and 1930’s.
Kraken Prospects
Seattle Kraken 2023 6th-round NHL Draft pick Visa Vedenpää took the 4-1 loss for Team Finland against Team USA Blue on Monday at the World Junior Summer Showcase in Plymouth, Michigan. The 6-foot-2, 170-pound netminder turned away 20 of 24 shots faced. Fellow Finn goalie and Kraken prospect Niklas Kokko won his first start of the event 4-2 against Team USA White on Saturday.
Finnish forward and 2022 Kraken 2nd-rounder Jani Nyman didn’t factor into the scoring on Monday, but he did pick up a minor penalty for the second consecutive game. The American split squad took a 2-0 first period lead and never looked back.
In Monday’s nightcap, Team USA White bounced back in a big way from that Saturday defeat by manhandling Team Sweden 10-1. In an extremely chippy affair that featured 21 penalties, many of them roughing and slashing calls, the Yanks ran away with things with two goals in the 1st period, four in the 2nd, and four more in the 3rd.
Swedish center Zeb Forsfjall, taken by the Kraken 12 picks after Vedenpää this summer, didn’t factor into the game summary.
On Wednesday Finland and Sweden play one another prior to the two USA squads going head-to-head. There are no Washington-born players on the American rosters.
— In a game that concluded Tuesday evening in Slovakia, Team Canada captain and Spokane Chiefs forward Berkly Catton scored twice in Canada’s 14-4 win over the host country on day two of the 2023 Hlinka Gretzky Cup that features many of the top prospects for the 2024 NHL Draft. Catton turns 18 in mid-January.
Clarification:
We’ve been reporting on three international hockey prospect events that occur simultaneously. With prospect reporting not typically being our main area of interest or expertise, we completely understand that the tracking of young players and events can be confusing and somewhat overwhelming.
That said, here’s a simple way to delineate what’s going on at the moment.
The World Junior Championship each year is considered a “19-year-old” tournament. Officially an Under-20 event, it generally sees the best, older junior eligible players representing their countries.
So the World Junior Summer Showcase is a look at the best players who have already been drafted into the NHL from three different countries. Again, with rare exceptions, NHL draft picks are taken when they’re 18-years-of-age. So the players in Plymouth have already been selected by NHL clubs.
The Hlinka Gretzky Cup features the next draft year; the prospects who are mostly age-17 who will hope to be picked in 2024. That tournament is unfolding in Czechia and Slovakia.
The Five Nations Cup is one-year behind that in terms of birth-year, featuring 16-year-olds who will be looking at getting plucked by an NHL team in the summer of 2025. Officially it’s an Under-17 tournament also taking place in Czechia and it overlaps the Hlinka Gretzky. One-stop shopping for scouts.
It’s three simultaneous events featuring high-end talent from three consecutive NHL Draft classes.
Speaking Of Prospects:
— Seattle Kraken of the Future: Oscar Fisker-Molgaard
— Seattle Kraken of the Future: Ryan Winterton
— Seattle Kraken of the Future: Eduard Sale
