SUNRISE, Fla. — Prepare to brake early.
Those Olympic end-boards might come at you faster than imagined.
Team USA captain Auston Matthews learned this week, like the rest of us, that the ice surface for the Milano Cortina Winter Games will be nearly four feet shorter than a standard NHL-sized ice rink.
This development — first broadcasted Monday by Team Canada assistant coach Peter DeBoer in his appearance on Real Kyper & Bourne — only adds a layer of questions on the 16,000-seat Milano Santagiulia Ice Hockey Arena, which is also battling construction delays.
How might a truncated ice surface impact best-on-best game play?
“I don’t know. Just hoping it gets ready on time, to be honest,” Matthews said Wednesday, after his Toronto Maple Leafs practised on the regular-sized Amerant Bank Arena in Florida.
“I don’t know what that looks like or what that feels like. I mean, in the end, you’re going there, and you’re representing your country. And it’s been something a lot of us have been yearning for, for a long time, to be able to have the opportunity to play in the Olympics.”
Team Sweden superstar William Nylander caught wind of the news Tuesday.
“That’s crazy,” said Nylander, who hadn’t processed the implications. “I mean, four feet? I dunno. We’ll see.”
A standard NHL-sized sheet runs 200 feet long by 85 feet wide, which is what the successful 4 Nations Face-Off was played on. But NHLers have also played on wider European ice in past Olympics.
The International Ice Hockey Federation approved a 60-by-26-metre surface (196.85 feet by 85.3 feet) in Milan, which is a smidge wider and more than three feet shorter than NHLers are accustomed to skating on.
“I don’t understand how that happened,” DeBoer said. “I don’t believe it’s a huge difference.
“But I believe there is a difference, and it’s on the smaller, not the bigger side.”
What’s unclear is how much of the lost ice will be subtracted from the neutral zone. Or just how much louder Tom Wilson’s skate-steps will get.
Presumably, arena dimensions will favour physical players and those who excel in tight spaces.
DeBoer also noted that the Olympic tournament will be officiated by a mix of NHL and IIHF referees, with NHL refs getting steered toward those matches featuring NHL-heavy rosters.
“What the bottom line of that is, is if Canada's playing Sweden, or Canada’s playing the U.S. — one of those games, where both teams are loaded with NHL players — it's going to be NHL refereeing,” DeBoer noted.
Delays in the Santagiulia’s construction, which are hardly uncommon to pre-Olympic headlines, have forced game tests to be shifted to a smaller rink.
The hockey players may well need to compete on untested, shortened ice in February.
The women’s tournament runs from Feb. 5-19. The men’s tournament goes from Feb. 11-22.
“In the end, it can be a 100-by-100-foot sheet. You just want to go out there and play and have that opportunity,” Matthews said.
“So, hopefully they can kind of resolve everything and get everything figured out. But in the end, just gotta go out there and play, I guess.”
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