On the Surface, NHL Has Lots of Problems

It chills our cocktails. Grounds our airplanes. Nurses our wounds. Endangers our highways.

It also holds particular sway over a group of rugged, stick-wielding men who lace on skates and chase a galvanized rubber slab across it for a living.

NHL players may be more preoccupied by ice than anybody else.

After all, it’s on a bed of frozen water that they ply their trade.

But in this era of multipurpose arenas, where ice rinks might be covered for a week or more while basketball games, concerts, tractor pulls carry on above, the playing surfaces around the league are far from uniform and in fact can vary greatly.

In Staples Center, host of today’s 52nd NHL All-Star game, the ice sheet ranks somewhere near the middle of the NHL pack on its best days and among the poorest in the league on its worst.

In Edmonton, home of the league’s most highly regarded playing surface, gliding across the well-manicured ice is “like skating on glass,” says Joe Nieuwendyk of the Dallas Stars. Which is to say, a good thing.

In Florida, it’s said to be like plowing through quicksand.

And while Madison Square Garden may be the self-proclaimed “world’s most famous arena,” its infamy around the NHL is due to its rutty ice.

Of course, it’s subjective.”The biggest determination on ice conditions is whether you win or lose,” King Coach Andy Murray says. “It’s not very often that I’m unhappy with the ice when we win. But when we lose, I’ve been known to say what’s wrong with it.”

There’s something to that, but obviously there’s more to it.

When the ice is smooth and hard, as it should be, it is capable of producing hockey at its most appealing--fast-paced and skillful, full of pinpoint passes and graceful, powerful skating.

But when the surface is substandard, the play is often sloppy.

Bad ice, the players say, is brittle. It’s bumpy. Or it’s slushy.

“We call it soft ice,” King center Bryan Smolinski says. “Your skates sink into it. You feel very lethargic, not crisp. The puck doesn’t slide, it wobbles.”

Rough ice can make a demanding sport that much more difficult.

“The puck is not going to lay flat,” Eric Lindros of the New York Rangers said in a recent interview. “It’s going to be bouncing around all the time. The easy passes are not going to be easy passes. They’re going to be tough passes. Handling that thing is going to be really difficult.”

Also difficult is understanding why the ice is not more uniform.

“With all the money being put into new arenas now,” Nieuwendyk says, “I always wondered why other cities couldn’t make ice like they do in Edmonton.”

It’s not for lack of trying.

Edmonton’s Skyreach Centre boasts built-in advantages over many of the league’s other arenas, among them the city’s dry air, mineral-rich water and lack of an NBA franchise, the latter giving it ample time to properly groom the ice.

Heat and humidity are natural enemies of smooth, hard ice, which is why arenas in warmer climates such as Los Angeles and Florida are at a disadvantage.

Also at a disadvantage are arenas that rarely go dark.

It’s no accident that many of the arenas with the most highly regarded ice sheets, among them Joe Louis Arena in Detroit, the Pengrowth Saddledome in Calgary and the Xcel Energy Center in St. Paul, Minn., are located in cold-weather climates and do not share space with NBA teams.

The frozen surface at General Motors Place in Vancouver, home of the Canucks, reportedly is much improved since the NBA’s Grizzlies moved to Memphis this season.

The one arena with a top-shelf ice surface and an NBA team is the Pepsi Center in Denver, home of the Nuggets and Colorado Avalanche.

The NHL recently began monitoring ice sheets around the league, asking referees and players from both teams to rate the ice after each game.

A one-page questionnaire asks if the ice surface is “hard and fast,” “chippy” or “soft and sluggish,” and asks for an overall rating of ice conditions as poor, below average, average, good or excellent.

“It’s not that the ice quality is considered a problem,” league spokesman Frank Brown says. “It’s our aim to make it as uniform as possible so that the game, the players and the fans can benefit.”

The ice sheets are ranked from top to bottom each month based on the information returned to the league. Seven teams, however, are not fully participating in the survey, according to a recent league memorandum.

At Staples Center, where the ice ranked 28th in the NHL in the league’s November survey but improved to 16th in December, the key is controlling as many variables as possible, said Lee Zeidman, the vice president of building operations.

Zeidman is only half-kidding when he says of the ice sheet in the home of the Kings, Lakers and Clippers, “It’s ranked No. 1 among buildings that have two NBA franchises.”

Of course, it’s the only one.

But all the activity at Staples, which hosts about 250 events a year, means that regular ice grooming is a rarity, Zeidman said.

“We’re one of the few buildings that gets very few open days to actually perform maintenance on the ice,” he says. “I’d say during the course of the season we may have maybe half a dozen days where the ice is actually exposed for a complete day without anything going on and allowing us to do maintenance.”

In Edmonton, the ice is exposed for six days in most weeks.

For King games, Zeidman and his crew try to keep the humidity in the building at about 40% and the air temperature between 62 and 66 degrees, about four to six degrees cooler than at Laker or Clipper games.

The temperature of the inch-thick ice sheet is 22-26 degrees.

At the suggestion of Dan Craig, hired as the league’s ice technician after building his reputation in Edmonton, Staples Center changed the water mixture in its ice this season to get a better density.

When the ice sheet was laid in September--it is removed each spring after the Kings’ season ends--tap water was mixed with de-ionized water for the first time, adding minerals to the ice.

“Adding minerals to the mix,” Craig explains, “creates a better density so that when the players are skating on it, it doesn’t chip away as easily.”

It has helped, but the ice sheet at the Kings’ practice facility in El Segundo is still superior to the one they skate on during games.

That’s because it’s housed in a much smaller building, making it easier to control humidity and temperature.

Craig has helped introduce other league-wide measures to improve ice conditions. Pregame youth games that used to chew up the ice before play are now banned. And during timeouts, workers clear the puck-stopping snow accumulation around the nets and in front of the benches.

“Basically, we can’t control Mother Nature,” he says, “so what we have to try to do is work the building around what Mother Nature gives us.

“So, on a rainy day, you have to make sure that you close up your building solid for as long as you can before the game [to keep the moisture out] and try to dehumidify your building with the units you have available to you.”

Craig is optimistic that, through hard work and education, the NHL’s ice sheets will one day be uniform.

Others are more skeptical.

“I don’t think it’s realistic that a place as busy as Madison Square Garden will ever have ice like they do in Edmonton,” says Jack Larson, vice president and general manager of the Xcel Energy Center, home of the Minnesota Wild.

Mathieu Schneider of the Kings is even more pessimistic.

“The league is trying to come up with a formula,” he says, “but they haven’t yet. You just have to get used to playing on bad ice.”