Global Series rink build ‘in really good shape’ for Kings, Coyotes

MELBOURNE, Australia -- The ice was starting to freeze at Rod Laver Arena when the Arizona Coyotes and Los Angeles Kings arrived Monday.

Shortly after their 15 1/2-hour, 8,000-mile charter flights from Los Angeles, the teams came to the place where they will play two preseason games Saturday and Sunday in the 2023 NHL Global Series -- Melbourne. 

The equipment staffs scrambled to set up the locker rooms. The Coyotes dressed in their equipment and bussed to a 40-minute skate at O’Brien Icehouse, a local rink where the teams will practice through Thursday. The Kings elected to hit the gym and do sprints at a field nearby.

Meanwhile, workers continued to prepare Rod Laver Arena for the NHL’s first event in the Southern Hemisphere. The games, which will start at 12 a.m. ET, will air on NHL Network and ESPN+ in the United States; Sportsnet and Sportsnet+ in Canada; and 9Go, 9Now, ESPN and the ESPN App in Australia.

“Right now, I think we’re in really good shape,” said Derek King, NHL senior director, facilities operations. “It’s all coming together.”

The NHL has two sets of equipment to build outdoor rinks, and it packed one set into three 40-foot shipping containers in June so it could build an indoor rink at Rod Laver Arena, home of the Australian Open tennis tournament.

The containers traveled by train from Toronto to Philadelphia, where they were loaded onto the Maersk Wellington, a cargo ship more than 254 meters long and more than 32 meters wide.

The ship departed Philadelphia on June 21; stopped in Charleston, South Carolina, on June 22-23; passed through the Panama Canal on June 30; and sailed across the equator and the South Pacific. It stopped in Tauranga, New Zealand, on July 21-22 and Sydney on July 25-26 before docking in Melbourne on July 29.

When an NHL group arrived in Melbourne on Thursday, the equipment was waiting in the loading dock at Rod Laver Arena.

“I inventoried everything that I sent,” King said. “It was a huge sigh of relief. I’m like, ‘OK, 51 pallets? Fifty-one pallets. It’s all there.’ I went through my little checklist with my highlighter and visually got my eyes on everything, which was good.”

The NHL group toured Rod Laver Arena and met the building’s staff Thursday. Workers already had installed a temporary center-hung scoreboard with four curved video screens, an important feature to give the arena an authentic NHL feel.

Workers built the foundation of the rink on top of the tennis court Friday and Saturday. Like the NHL does for an outdoor game, they built a level platform and laid a layer of plywood on top to strengthen it.

They installed the ice-making system and dasher boards Sunday, working from 6 a.m. to 1 a.m. local time.

The NHL didn’t want to send its usual ice-making system halfway around the world due to the wear and tear of the trip, so it decided to work with Ice World, a company from the Netherlands.

Instead of using a floor of aluminum pans with built-in piping to carry the coolant, the NHL is using a rubber liner with piping on top.

Instead of spraying thin layers of water to build a base of ice, it brought in three water trucks and flooded the rubber liner with about 21,000 gallons of water from about 10 to 11 p.m. local time -- about 2 1/2 or 2 3/4 inches deep, enough to cover the piping.

“We filled it like a swimming pool and will finish making the sheet like we do for all the other games, paying attention to detail,” King said.

At about noon local time Monday, King stepped on the ice surface. Wet on top, it was solid underneath. The plan was to give it more time to set, paint it white and seal it with a thin layer of ice, and lay the lines and logos and seal them with another thin layer.

Workers will spray thin layers of water to build another 1 inch of ice on top of that, so the sheet will be dense enough to handle NHL competition. The NHL shipped two ice resurfacing machines to do the rest.

The glass and dasher ads will go up Tuesday, and workers will start building the penalty boxes and team benches.

Once they do all that, King said, “it will look like any other NHL arena.”

With some special touches that are top secret for now.

“We’ve added a few things in to kind of tie in hockey to tennis,” King said, smiling.

The teams will each hold an open practice at Rod Laver Arena on Friday before playing the games Saturday and Sunday.

The arena was built for tennis, and a tennis court is smaller than an NHL rink. At one end, the lower-bowl seats have been retracted, and the upper bowl has an obstructed view. But the rest of the seats have great sightlines.

“It’s very intimate; the fans will be close to the action,” King said. “We’ve taken up all the room that we can. As you can see, we’re right to the end wall there. Not a lot of room here, so we just fit, which is good. It’ll be exciting.”