The thing about UBS Arena, shiny and new as it may be, is that it gives players in the game an experience that might best be described as normal. There are no quirks or intricacies to its ice. The character of the place comes in the form of its amenities.
This is probably a good thing. Part of the reason the Islanders were so desperate to get out of Nassau Coliseum, after all, is that the building was a relic of the era in which it was built — a characteristic that extended to the playing surface. There was a dead zone in one end of the ice and on the other, a door that would loosen up. The glass was old.
“There was some of those things that kick off real strange and you had to be ready for them,” Islanders coach Barry Trotz said. “Time always wins.”
A new arena, though, takes time out of the equation. And with it, all those little things that added up to something of a home-ice advantage.
Exactly how much of one?
Well, last season, the Islanders were 21-4-3 in their building. This season, they are 19-15-5.
Knowing how the puck plays off the boards is, surely, a miniscule part of that equation. More pressing would be the COVID-19 outbreak the Islanders suffered right around their home opener, more diversity in the schedule and the simple fact that the 2021-22 Islanders are not as good of a team as the 2020-21 Islanders.
It does, though, have a place — however small.
“I think you know your own rink, you know your own bounces,” Trotz said. “When the puck comes around by our door, when we were at the Coliseum, our wingers wouldn’t get their skates on the wall. They’d actually play a little more dot line, cause [the puck] didn’t always play true. They would learn that. Where an opposition [team] coming in here once, maybe twice a year, they probably wouldn’t know that.”
The list of arenas where factors like that continue to be an advantage is dwindling. Joe Louis Arena, where Anders Lee remembers the walls being particularly bouncy, had its last hurrah in 2017. Madison Square Garden underwent a renovation last decade. The old Boston Garden, with its shoebox of a visitors locker room, is long gone.
Calgary’s Saddledome, with its deteriorating roof and old-school eccentricities, is the only arena left in the league to have opened before 1990 without undergoing a 21st-century renovation — a distinction it holds due to local politics more so than a desire to keep things the same.
And so when asked to ponder how the puck might bounce differently off the boards across the league’s 32 different buildings, Anders Lee said: “For the most part, I think it’s fairly consistent throughout the league.”
Understanding how the puck plays off different surfaces is still a part of the scouting report for goaltenders when playing in road buildings, and during a regular morning skate, players will shoot a few pucks off the boards to see how it might bounce.
But what might have been a noticeable difference across the map 20 years ago is dwindling.
The Coliseum was one of the last with such a character.
“Maybe say at the Coli, if you try to go indirect on a breakout pass or something like that off the boards, a lot of times the puck would bounce in the air and go down for an icing,” Adam Pelech said. “I guess if you know that, you’re trying to make direct passes and not really use the boards. Or the Zamboni door is behind the net and you know it’s gonna bounce off it weird, maybe you’re making a D-to-D pass, it’s direct rather than off the boards.”
As for UBS Arena?
It’s perfectly normal. And the Islanders are perfectly happy with that.
“They all had their old character,” Trotz said of the NHL’s old guard of arenas. “On the ice, there’s some nuances. They’re getting pretty standard now, which is good.”