Head coach Jon Cooper of Team Canada during training at Milano Santagiulia Ice Hockey Arena on Sunday.Gregory Shamus/Getty Images
Even before the first puck is dropped in the men’s hockey tournament in Milan, the hockey world has already seen a new record set: Most time spent talking about the size of a rink.
In the past few months, the slightly off-kilter size of the Santagiulia Ice Hockey Arena has been the subject of endless debate anywhere hockey is discussed.
Though NHL players are returning to the Olympics for the first time in 12 years, the rink itself is not quite NHL size. It’s about three feet shorter and a few inches wider.
Just to recap the whole sordid affair: An NHL rink is 200 feet long by 85 feet wide. The rink in Milan is 60 metres long by 26 metres wide, or about 196.85 feet long by 85.3 feet wide.
The International Ice Hockey Federation has a standard footprint for what it deems to be a North American-size rink, and it lists those specs in metric. It’s a close proximity to the imperial measurements used by the NHL, but not exact.
As NHLers hit the ice in Milan, Canada gets down to business
But the NHL and the International Ice Hockey Federation apparently don’t communicate well with each other. When Olympic organizers went to build the rink, they used the IIHF specs. And it appears the NHL never checked.
To hear the head ice maker in Milan tell it, no one should have been surprised.
“I always knew,” said Don Moffatt, who is in charge of icemaking for the NHL’s Colorado Avalanche and was brought in to oversee the playing surface in Milan. “We’ve been in meetings for three, three and a half years with the NHL, with IOC, with everybody.”
A general view of the Milano Santagiulia Ice Hockey Arena during training.Mike Segar/Reuters
So what happened exactly?
“What I’m pretty confident happened, there was an agreement between the National Hockey League and the IIHF,” Moffatt said. “I will guarantee you 90 per cent of that agreement was all financial, so the operations guys didn’t get the memo.”
This has resulted in a slightly smaller neutral zone in Milan, which is where the missing three feet have been subtracted.
It’s not perfect. But regardless of the messy details and the finger pointing, the real question is: Does it even matter?
For any hockey fans worked up about the rink size at the Olympics, here are five reasons why it probably doesn’t.
Connor McDavid doesn’t care; why should you?
When he saw the arena for the first time on Sunday, the world’s best hockey player wasn’t bothered. In fact, none of the players seem to care. And nobody wants to be seen making excuses either. “It’s an even playing field for everybody,” McDavid said. “It’s the same ice that everyone’s going to be skating on, so it’s great.”
Edmonton Oilers star Connor McDavid saw no point in complaining about the size of the ice surface for the Olympic Games.Gregory Shamus/Getty Images
American Jack Eichel put it a different way: “At the end of the day, it’s a hockey rink,” he said. “There’s a red line, a couple of blue lines. There’s two nets and a bunch of face-off dots and circles. It’s the same thing, so we’ll adapt and we’ll be ready to go.”
The Olympics have rarely been played on an NHL-size rink
Since NHL players began going to the Olympics in 1998, a best-on-best Winter Games appears to have only been played on a regulation NHL rink once. That would be in Vancouver in 2010, when organizers successfully convinced Olympic officials to allow them to use the Canucks arena as-is, arguing that it would be too costly to rip out seats and build a larger international-size rink, which was always the standard for the Winter Games.
The ‘Olympic-size’ rink, as it is known, is a lot wider, measuring 60 metres long by 30 metres wide, or 196.85 feet by 98.4 feet. Other Olympics the NHL has attended have been played on that larger size, including Nagano 1998, Turin 2006, and Sochi 2014.
The only question mark is 2002. The Salt Lake Winter Games are rumoured to have been played on a rink that was neither NHL size nor Olympic size, though nobody appears to have made a fuss about it. The Globe and Mail sent questions to the IIHF in January in an effort to confirm this, but the organization did not respond.
Vegas Golden Knights forward Mitch Marner said that playing on different sized ice surfaces is a part of growing up playing hockey.Gregory Shamus/Getty Images
Playing on different rinks is part of life for most NHL players
To get to the NHL, most players come up through the junior or college ranks in Canada and the United States, or various leagues in Europe. That means playing on imperfect rinks that may differ slightly in size, from Moose Jaw to Malmo. It’s something NHL players are used to.
Canadian forward Mitch Marner wasn’t too concerned upon arriving in Milan. “I’ve played on a thousand different ones,” Marner said. “It’s a hockey rink. It will maybe take a day or two to kind of get used to it. Maybe the pace might be a little different, with the neutral zone a little smaller. But, like I said, it’s another hockey rink.”
NHL players have played on this size before – and didn’t notice
When the NHL travels to Europe for its Global Series, an annual tour where the league takes games to Sweden, Finland, Czechia and elsewhere, this rink size has played host for some games. The Toronto Maple Leafs went to Sweden in 2023 and games were played on the IIHF’s smaller footprint.
But Auston Matthews saw nothing amiss. “I found this out just a month or so ago that when we went to Sweden, it was the same kind of size,” Matthews said recently. “But if nobody would have told me that I wouldn’t have had any idea, to be honest.”
The goalies, famous for being picky, aren’t worried
During Team Canada’s first practice in Milan, a coach fired pucks down the boards and Canadian goalie Darcy Kuemper ventured behind the net to stop them, watching closely at how each puck zipped around the corners. The slightly different dimensions have resulted in a subtly more oval-like curve to the end boards and Kuemper wanted to see for himself.
The verdict? “It didn’t seem to be that different,” he said. “We were just looking to see if there were any bounces, or if it rolled true. It was really good. It was pretty quick, but it stayed true to how it should.”
U.S. goalie Connor Hellebuyck expects the smaller neutral zone will quicken play somewhat. “Anytime you take space away from NHL players, it speeds up the game and it gets a little more chaotic. So I think it’ll make for a fun tournament,” Hellebuyck said. Fellow American goalie Jeremy Swayman welcomed that.
“Good,” Swayman said. “Make it fast, baby. I love it. Play fast.”