On Tuesday, NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman paid a visit to Tampa as preparations continue to ramp up for the Feb. 1 NHL Stadium Series game between the Tampa Bay Lightning and the Boston Bruins.
Bettman said a tent will be built over the ice and remain in place until just before puck drop, protecting the surface from any potential weather issues. The process has been compared to a Super Bowl halftime show, with the setup rolled out and then taken down with precise timing.
The NHL Stadium Series game has been a long time coming for the Lightning, with the organization advocating on behalf of their fanbase for years. After Tampa hosted the 2018 NHL All-Star Game, the Tampa Bay Sports Commission put up billboards along I-275 near the Tampa airport pitching an outdoor game. Bettman remembered it clearly.
“The timing wasn’t right (years ago),” Bettman said. “But over the last few years, we remained focused, Lightning owner Jeff Vinik has remained relentless, and we continued to think about and explore the ways that we could do it. And we think we’ve got it right.”
“Until we take it down, you won’t see how the field is going to be decorated, because we’re going to basically do that on wheels and get it out. It’ll all be designed, but it won’t be put out there until before the game.”
Bettman said that if the weather mirrors Tuesday’s conditions, 66 degrees with no rain, their plan should be a success.
“Weather is a concern,” Bettman said. “The biggest concern for us in these games is generally humidity and rain and the sun, but we’ll play late enough in the day, so the sun won’t be an issue. If you remember when we played in Lake Tahoe during COVID, it was in the 20s or 30s, but the sun was destroying the ice during the day.”
© Eric Bolte-Imagn ImagesLightning general manager Julien BriseBois knew the team’s goal of having an outdoor game in Tampa would eventually become reality, admitting he brought it up at every opportunity.
“I felt confident we would always get it because we would wear them down,” Brisebois said. “Every GM meeting, I brought it up, even if it wasn’t on the agenda. ‘Hey, outdoor game! We deserve an outdoor game. What more do we as an organization and our fans as a fanbase need to do to get an outdoor game?’ So I was very confident that eventually we would get one.”
When the Lightning faced the Nashville Predators in the 2022 Stadium Series game, 25,000 Lightning fans flew out to Nashville, proving Tampa could easily support it's own outdoor game.
“It’s grown over the years to become a more and more sophisticated hockey market,” BriseBois said of the fanbase in Tampa. “Not only are they passionate about our team and the game, but they are knowledgeable about the game, which certainly wasn’t the case when Phil (Esposito) started the team in 1992. Our fans deserve it. We had the outdoor game in Nashville. That building was 50/50, Lightning fans and Nashville fans.”
BriseBois said years of big ideas were thrown around to try and make the game possible. The most ambitious? A temporary dome built over the stadium, that was lifted away by helicopters from MacDill Air Force Base before puck drop.
“It wasn’t our idea, but it’s an interesting idea,” said BriseBois. “On TV, that would look amazing, like a made-for-TV event. And then the logistics of it and the safety of it … those are residential neighborhoods, there’s 65,000 people in the stadium and we’re gonna fly over them, I’m not sure we would get the insurance.”
“But over the years, we’ve had a lot of different scenarios, different ideas. And credit to the NHL for coming up with this solution, because this was their solution. They came up with the idea. They came up with the partners who could do it. From an engineering standpoint, they’ve been doing dry runs in Texas seeing if it works, how quickly they can disassemble this, how quickly they can assemble it, and it’s worked out good. And now, hopefully, we have a beautiful, cool Tampa evening on Feb. 1, and it’s gonna be phenomenal.”