Jake Neighbours, Zack Bolduc among Blues to play their first outdoor game in NHL

CHICAGO — Jake Neighbours would wake up, check his phone and figure out where he was going.

Would it be a pond? Or a lake? Or a basketball court that was flooded and frozen into a rink?

“Literally wake up: ‘What rink are we going to?’” Neighbours said. “‘I heard this one’s got good ice.’ ‘All right, we’ll go there.’ And if it sucked, we’d pack up and go to another one. Some of the best memories.”

When he was younger, he would walk to the nearest outdoor rink when he was growing up in Calgary. And then his radius grew once he started driving.

“You’d always figure out from friends around the city who had the best ice that day, and you’d go to that rink,” Neighbours said. “Or if one wasn’t busy and you could get the whole rink to yourself, little things like that it what it grew into.”

Neighbours will get his chance to play on a much bigger stage Tuesday, when he plays in the first outdoor game of his NHL career as the Blues take on the Blackhawks at Wrigley Field. Neighbours will be among a handful of Blues players playing outdoors for the first time in their NHL careers, as Zack Bolduc, Alexandre Texier, Nathan Walker, Alexey Toropchenko, Tyler Tucker and Joel Hofer will also be first-timers.

Every other Blues player has played in an outdoor game, including eight who played at Target Field in Minnesota in 2022.

“It’s going to be like a dream,” Bolduc said. “Growing up watching Winter Classics, it’s going to be a fun few days in Chicago for sure.”

Neighbours, the 22-year-old who scored 27 goals for the Blues last season, said skating outdoors “was all I did” during winters in Alberta.

“It’s the pinnacle of hockey for me,” Neighbours said. “Being a Canadian kid, playing on the outdoor rink, some of those memories are the best memories I’ve ever had playing hockey, and it’s why you loved the game. Probably one of the bigger reasons why I fell in love with the sport. Being able to do it at this level and this stage is going to be really cool.”

Neighbours remembers one rink in particular.

It belonged to Pat Seeley, one of Neighbours’ coaches when he was younger. He built a near full-size rink in the backyard and flooded it with his modified Zamboni. Neighbours and his friends would arrive at 9 a.m., skate until 1 p.m., “come in with our skates still on,” eat lunch, go back until 6 p.m., eat dinner, and then — you guessed it — go back on the now-illuminated ice.

Outdoor skating would cause Neighbours’ parents more problems, too.

“My parents used to have the biggest headaches because I’d come home from school, and my practice wouldn’t be until 7,” Neighbours said. “I would go to the (outdoor rink) from 4 until 6. They would pick me up from the (outdoor rink), take me to practice and my skates would be dull from the bad ice. Then I would be terrible on the real practice. I couldn’t even skate. They would be pissed at me.”

Bolduc followed a similar schedule when he was growing up in Quebec. Once his homework was finished, he would hit the outdoor rink. When Bolduc goes home for Christmas, he sometimes will still sometimes visit the outdoor rink.

“After dinner, you go there with pretty much always the same friends every night,” Bolduc said. “It’s good memories, and when I’m going back home at my parents’ house, the outside rink is still there and it reminds me always of good memories.”

Both Bolduc (born in 2003) and Neighbours (2002) are young enough to have grown up with outdoor games as a regular occurrence. The first outdoor game was in 2003 and the first Winter Classic in 2008.

Bolduc picks out the original Winter Classic between Pittsburgh (“the baby blues with the snow,” as Bolduc says) and Buffalo as a favorite. He also liked watching the Canada-United States outdoor game at the 2018 World Juniors.

Now, it’ll be Neighbours’ and Bolduc’s turn.

“I think it’s going to be like a playoff game,” Neighbours said. “The excitement around the game, and the uniqueness it brings and how rare it is that you get the chance to play in one. From people who’ve played in it in past years and hearing it on podcasts, it’s like a middle of the season playoff game. I’m really excited for that.”

Practice updates

The Blues practice on Monday night at Wrigley Field, getting used to the outdoor surroundings before playing the Blackhawks on Tuesday.

Forward Radek Faksa did not skate with the Blues as he recovers from a cut close to his groin. Mathieu Joseph participated as an extra forward, while Scott Perunovich looked to be the odd man out on defense.