The thing with the Winter Classic is that while it obviously harkens back to the days of playing on frozen lakes and the like, the best place to actually hold a game like that would be the areas of the continent where it was impossible to - a hockey-loving kid growing up just outside Houston or in Miami is never ever going to have the same opportunity to do it like youngsters from north of the border, and that seems a terrible shame. While it IS a gimmick, it's a fun and enjoyable gimmick that if done correctly won't have any sort of deleterious effect on game quality, and that sort of thing can only be good for the game, especially from a marketing perspective. Go the whole hog with it - unique jerseys, old-school logos on the ice, reduce prices of the concessions to S1 levels, that kind of thing.

Simo's preference for a Winter Classic matchup would be a southern team coming north, but if that's not possible then a "revenge" game between the Argonauts and Edmonton would be fun. He has no beef with leaving Edmonton or the way it went down, but there would be an obvious extra bit of spice in demonstrating to the Blizzard why they did their rebuild no favours dropping a superbly talented defenseman so early on.