WEST KELOWNA’S CRAIG PROUD OF BUBBLE ICE
Rinks hold up to NHL experiment
EDMONTON — The end is near for the bubbled NHL playoffs, and those in charge of the rinks say it’s been smooth as an ice sheet — except maybe when teams come to play for three periods and stay on for another five.
“That was a fun game, definitely something I’m going to remember,” said Derek King, recalling the Aug. 11 first-round game between the Columbus Blue Jackets and Tampa Bay Lightning in Toronto’s Scotiabank Arena. It didn’t end until Tampa’s Brayden Point scored midway through the fifth overtime.
King said his crew adjusted on the fly, monitoring real-time sensors on ambient temperatures, ice temperatures and humidity levels, as the first overtime became the second, became the third, then the fourth...
The ice, meanwhile, was grinding down from one and a half inches to close to an inch — the red line for ice levels.
“We had gotten to the fifth period. We didn’t know how many more we were going to go,” said King. “We kept more of a focus and greater detail on the amount of ice we were pulling off ... to our ice temperatures and the amount of water we were putting on. ... You don’t want to shock the players, so to speak, when they come out, going from a soft sheet of ice to a hard sheet of ice and back and forth.
“We had a good crew. We knew what we had to do.”
King handled games in Toronto, watching the ice, boards, gates, glass and all other elements of the state of play. Counterpart Mike Craig of West Kelowna did the same in Edmonton, with King later joining Craig in Edmonton for the final-four round and now the Stanley Cup final.
There were 24 teams involved in the return-to-play scenario, with games played with no spectators. The players, and Craig and King, were kept in isolation between contests to prevent contracting the coronavirus.
Humidity can be the arch-nemesis of icemakers, but Craig said with as many as two or three games a day during the early rounds, the enemy was losing ice depth.
They corrected that by building the depth a bit higher than normal at the start of the day and then working overnight to mist layer by careful layer of water, over and over again, to build the ice back up.
“From the start of the tournament, we’ve had pretty much a 24-hour-a-day schedule with the local crew,” said Craig. “Even on three games a day, we were able to maintain the ice exactly the way we wanted.”
Both Craig and King have years of experience in ice-meistering, Craig at his father Dan’s knee when Dan built the ice-white platform the Edmonton Oilers dynasty skated on in the 1980s, then cutting his teeth on a multiplex facility in Kelowna.
King started on a small rink in Manitoba, graduated to MTS Centre in Winnipeg and then to the NHL. Experience can be measured in the challenging NHL special event games, building ice from Dallas to Beijing.
Craig has worked on 23 outdoor games, King on 15 or so. It can get hairy.
King was there when heat and rain washed out the Dallas sheet four days before the New Year’s Day outdoor contest this year, melting it into an ice-white soup that crews, working around the clock, cleaned up and rebuilt.
“Practice day it went great and game day it went fine,” he said. “As much as it was a stressful time, I would do it all over again with the people I worked with.”
Watch hockey with both and you’re viewing two different games. King says while friends are cheering the goals, he’s looking at how the players skate, how much snow is building up, and whether the puck is lying flat or bouncing around like popcorn in a popper.
If a shot takes a weird bounce off the boards, he wonders if there is a defect or a popped-out screw. During games, if a player falls with nobody around him, he might go out there between Zamboni floods to inspect the spot and make sure everything is fine.
The bubbled playoffs, going on now for two months, have been a boon to the icemaker as it makes it easier to handle the humidity and environment — with reporters and photographers in coats and gloves shivering in the higher elevations of the rink — but a bummer when cheering fans are replaced by silent tarps.
“We’ve been able to keep things very consistent, but we’d much rather have fans in the building,” said Craig.