As the Zamboni Idles, N.H.L. Ice Crews Do the Heavy Clearing (Published 2015) (2024)

Chris Jennings glanced up at the video board at Wells Fargo Center in Philadelphia during a Flyers game last month, then at the players slicing along his ice and back up at the video board. Standing by the Zamboni gate, Jennings turned and called out to the eight men and four women behind him.

“Next whistle,” he said.

Jennings is the arena’s head ice technician, an exacting boss who considers his domain less a democracy than a dictatorship. At his command, his crew grabbed the shovels that were leaning against a wall and, when the doors opened, skated out to perform one of the more essential, if underappreciated, tasks at an N.H.L. game.

The Flyers’ ice crew, like others around the league, must repeatedly clear the entire 200-foot-by-85-foot surface of the ice shavings that accumulate during a game. Up and down the ice they go, a synchronized cavalcade that complements the between-periods resurfacing efforts of the Zamboni, the more heralded symbol of ice preparation, to facilitate puck movement and maintain the quality of play.

“The whole thing is, don’t worry about time — just do the job right,” Travis Larson, the ice operations and event manager at Xcel Energy Center in St. Paul, where the Minnesota Wild play, said in a telephone interview. “If we do that and it takes a little bit longer, that’s all right. I’d rather have that than get called out to do the work you just did. You never want to get called out and do a walk of shame.”

The ice teams have roughly 30 to 45 fewer seconds to clean the surface than a baseball grounds crew has to manicure an infield and pitching mound between innings, and they do so at least nine times every game — three times each period, at the first whistle after the 14-, 10- and six-minute marks — and again, if necessary, before overtime. In the playoffs, when there are no commercial breaks after regulation, the surface is cleared during the first stoppage after the midway point of overtime. And the crews do it all with players and officials on the ice with them.

“You can imagine the snow that we remove now when we’re on the ice for only six minutes, what it was like when we were on the ice for a whole period,” Murphy said.

The quickness of the game and the skill of the players, coupled with longer and more formal commercial breaks, precipitated a gradual shift. Soon the goal crease was added to the ice crew’s duties, then the slot, and then the offensive zones, after the lockout that ended in January 2013. This season the N.H.L. declared cleaning the full surface compulsory.

Many crews already did that. But to show teams what it considered the best approach, the N.H.L. sent a video of Larson’s Wild crew, which borrowed from the snow-removal method used at the league’s outdoor games. The configuration is called the Flying V — like the signature play in the movie “The Mighty Ducks.” Minnesota’s crew fans out like a flock of ducks, five on each side with one at the front, and heads up the middle of the ice.

As the lead skater stays behind to tidy up the crease, each trailing quintet continues to glide up and down the ice, dropping off a pile of shavings near the Zamboni gate each time it passes.

The entry to the Wells Fargo Center rink is to the left of one of the goals, so Jennings’s skaters shovel across the crease and behind the goal before joining others in the Flying V. He orders them to overlap and to stay close to one another, to avoid missing a strip.

“The preseason, like it is for players, was for us to try it out,” Jennings said. “We took one night in here, probably four hours, and ran through it.”

According to Jennings’s calculations, the sweet spot for his group, that marriage of speed and proficiency, is 1 minute 45 seconds. It allows his skaters to clean the ice and come back, with the gate locked and secured, before the red light in the penalty box goes off to signal that time is up. Before his crew routinely finished its work within the desired range, he assigned each member a position in the lineup — the most adept member at the front — and clocked each foray with a stopwatch.

In most cases, the crews consist of part-timers and former hockey players or figure skaters. Some include women wearing skimpy uniforms, known as Ice Girls in many places. After an all-male cleaning team made its debut in Philadelphia in the preseason, fans booed until the Ice Girls were reinstated (their return was announced on a video, set to the theme of “2001: A Space Odyssey,” shown in the arena).

There are no Ice Girls in Montreal, that bastion of tradition, just eight men — the minimum, as mandated by the league. After some experimentation, Francois Martindale, the supervisor of operations at Bell Centre, came to favor an alignment that featured the eight skaters following one another at staggered widths.

At most other arenas, crews attack the area by the benches last to avoid colliding or interfering with players receiving instruction during a timeout. Martindale’s group, however, heads there first, which can create a bit of a traffic jam. During a first-period break last month, the ice crew’s progress was stopped for a few seconds by Lightning center Vladislav Namestnikov, who, apparently unaware of the eight shovel-wielding men skating toward him, did not budge.

Upon completing their first lap around the boards, the skaters ditch the shavings in front of the open gate, where they are scooped and transferred into a gravel bucket that, Martindale said, is “at least 200 years old.” To finish, the skaters make a tight turn around the net and go up the middle of the ice. It looks, from up high, like a paper clip.

“Pushing a shovel is pushing a shovel, whether you do it on foot or you do it on ice — I give you the pattern, and you do it,” Martindale said in a recent interview. “But the French thing is the classy thing, and they’re always worried here. ‘Frank, do you think it’s going to look classy? Do you think it’s going to look good on the ice?’ I said, ‘Guys, we’ll make sure.’”

Watching it all from the league office in Toronto, where real-time feeds focus on the ice during commercial breaks, Murphy cares little about the visual appeal. He monitors a crew’s overall performance — its promptness, efficiency and so on — while making sure that players do not obstruct the process. If a goaltender lingers too long in a crease, for instance, Murphy might contact the team’s general manager. The on-ice officials also assess a crew’s skills in the report they file after every game.

“As long as everything’s quiet, that means everything’s good,” said Scooter Fruik, the ice manager at Bridgestone Arena in Nashville.

Jennings said he had not received any complaints from the league. But for his own documentation, he keeps a detailed report for every game. It logs, among other things, the time elapsed between each stoppage and how much loose ice was collected. During every shift, the crew deposits the shavings in four 20-gallon cans at each corner of the rink. Those cans are then emptied into a 44-gallon receptacle, which can be anywhere from a quarter to three-quarters full after each shift.

On a recent night, a snowstorm thinned Jennings’s ranks, leaving his crew two short. Even after a crisp pace to the opening period created nearly nine minutes’ worth of amassed shavings, the group managed to clean the ice in 1:51.

There was barely enough time for some of the crew members to dump the shavings into a pit near the Zambonis, where a hot shower expedited melting, before the next stoppage arrived less than three minutes later.

“There we go,” Jennings said, and out they went.