Monday is Canadian Thanksgiving, but will Detroit sports fans have something to be thankful for?
The NHL has moved up the Detroit Red Wings‘ game on the holiday – Monday, Oct. 13 – in Toronto because no matter what, the Blue Jays will be hosting a game in the 2025 MLB playoffs.
The Wings were originally scheduled to play the Maple Leafs at 4 p.m. Monday at Scotiabank Arena in downtown Toronto. But the Blue Jays will be hosting Game 2 of the ALCS at Rogers Centre at either 4:38 or 5:03 p.m. that day.
Rogers Centre and Scotiabank Arena are slightly further apart than the baseball and hockey stadiums in Detroit, with a distance in Toronto of approximately 1.1 miles. But both games should draw big crowds, and so the Wings-Leafs game was changed to 2 p.m.
The game falls on Canadian Thanksgiving, a holiday across America’s neighbor.
Of course, the crowd could get even bigger, depending on the results of Friday’s ALDS game in Seattle between the Detroit Tigers and the Seattle Mariners; the winner of that game advances to play the Blue Jays in the ALCS.
A Tigers win on Friday could create an unexpected Detroit/Toronto doubleheader, with another bonus: The Maple Leafs plan to show the entirety of the Jays’ playoff game on the video board at Scotiabank Arena.
Monday’s Wings/Leafs game is the back half of a home-and-home between the teams, with Toronto visiting Detroit’s Little Caesars Arena (7 p.m., FanDuel Sports Network Detroit).
Contact Helene St. James at hstjames@freepress.com. Read more on the Detroit Red Wings and sign up for our Red Wings newsletter.
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