A hockey game cancelled because the ice wasn’t frozen enough? Don’t see that everyday. The Carolina Hurricanes’ game against the Detroit Red Wings at PNC Arena Monday night that was scheduled to begin at 7 p.m. was postponed due to unsafe ice conditions. The team made the official announcement around 8:45 p.m.
According to Canes President Don Waddell, the team became aware of the issue around 6 p.m., right around the time the teams would have gone out for warmups. Waddell said the ice is monitored by a computer 24 hours a day, and an alarm sounds when the ice temperature becomes too high.
“A seal broke on the main compressor that runs the ice chiller,” Waddell said. “So the seal broke and started shooting out the freon. Once you shut the system down, you have to fix the part that broke. Then we had to bring gas in that mixes with the freon.”
The biggest issue here was that Detroit plays tomorrow night in Tampa Bay at 7:30 p.m. and the NHL has a 22-hour policy for time elapsed between games a team plays.
“The problem is the ice temperature got up to about 30 degrees,” Waddell said. “Once we started chilling it, it was dropping, but at the rate it was dropping it wouldn’t have been until about 9:45 p.m. that we were comfortable with the players playing on it; the safety of the players is first and foremost.”
The game presented a fairly unique situation in terms of a postponement. Particularly in a league where many teams play in the Northeastern United States and Canada, it is not unheard of for games to be postponed due to weather. However, when that happens, the determination is usually made well before game time to keep fans off the road.
Tonight, everyone who had planned on attending the game was in the building, and a large chorus of boos greeted the announcement that the game had been postponed before people began filing out.
Rescheduling the game will not be easy, as the NHL was already working with a very compressed schedule this year due to the World Cup of Hockey delaying the start of the season and the implementation of “bye weeks” this year, a mandated five-day break in each team’s schedule.
Work will begin immediately tomorrow on finding a date to make up the game, and figuring out how the fans who came to PNC tonight will be reimbursed.
“We’ll come up with a plan,” Waddell said. “Our fans are obviously important to us here in Raleigh, and we’ve got to make it good for them.”
Hurricanes general manager Ron Francis played a lot of games in his Hall-of-Fame NHL career. A situation like this was not something he had seen before.
“I remember watching the movie ‘Bull Durham’ where the guy said ‘Do you want a rain out?’,” Francis said. “I didn’t know we could ever do that in hockey, so it’s a first for me.
The Canes will return to action Thursday in Buffalo against the Sabres before hosting the Boston Bruins Friday.
