The latest step in that development came Monday, when the NHL Stadium Series Ice Plant arrived at Nissan Stadium, home to the NFL's Tennessee Titans, in preparation for the 2022 Navy Federal Credit Union NHL Stadium Series between the Nashville Predators and Tampa Bay Lightning on Feb. 26.
The 53-foot trailer, the world's largest mobile refrigeration unit, houses the ice-making and ice-monitoring equipment used to create an NHL-caliber sheet of ice.
"It's pretty cool to actually be here and to start the work now," NHL senior manager of facilities operations and hockey operations Derek King said. "There's a lot of stuff going on, and it's pretty busy, but it's pretty cool to be in Nashville to do this game."
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The game will be another opportunity for the NHL's southern fans to experience a game outdoors, with a football-sized crowd of more than 69,000 set to provide a high-octane atmosphere. It comes two years after the Predators and Dallas Stars played in the 2020 Bridgestone Winter Classic at Cotton Bowl Stadium in Dallas, the southernmost regular-season outdoor game in NHL history.
Former Predators goalie Chris Mason, now a team broadcaster, experienced an outdoor game as an alum with the St. Louis Blues in 2016 at Busch Stadium, home of the St. Louis Cardinals.
"This should be great," Mason said. "If you want to grow the game, you need to go to the southern markets and different markets. The NHL has done a good job of expanding and trying these types of games, adding a few more.
"I feel like it's really impactful because fans from everywhere come to these games. They get to experience what it's like in Nashville to go to a hockey game or to experience the best city in the country."
King said his crew will spend the next four days constructing the rink before starting to work on the sheet of ice, which begins with the Ice Plant trailer pumping as much as 3,000 gallons of glycol coolant through a series of hoses and into custom-made aluminum trays on Nissan Stadium's field.
After the placement of the trays, the rink boards are installed. Once those are up, and the ideal surface temperature is attained, the actual process of building the ice begins. An outdoor rink requires up to two inches of ice thickness to help withstand the more extreme elements.
Water is added as slowly as possible -- in as fine a mist as the process will allow -- with workers passing the spray wand over the rink hundreds of times, providing a more even freeze and a better quality playing surface.
Most of the work on the ice build at Nissan Stadium will be done at night, with the rink covered during the day to avoid the sun.
"There's really no sense in trying to fight Mother Nature," King said. "We'll just adapt our schedule to what we need to do."
The forecast for Nashville on Feb. 26 has temperatures in the mid-50s during the day before dropping to the mid-30s.
"We'll deal with whatever we get," King said. "We've done that before at a lot of games … but I think if we're in the low-50s or mid-50s that night, that would be a pretty good setup for us."
