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Tom Kostopoulos’ experience playing in an outdoor game is a bit different from Saturday’s contest between the Pittsburgh Penguins and Philadelphia Flyers.
While this year’s outdoor game is expected to be played in mild temperatures, Kostopoulos battled a different element when his Calgary Flames took on the Montreal Canadiens in the 2011 Heritage Classic.
The game was played on Feb. 20 in Calgary, and bitter cold temperatures threatened the event from even taking place.
Wind chills were reported at -13 degrees, and Kostopoulos recalled the numerous times the threshold temperature for calling off the game was changed in the days leading up to the event.
“A week before it was -8 (Celsius), and two days before they said -10 and we won’t play. And then we played at -12,” Kostopoulos said. “We were freezing. Your face and neck gets cold. Our coaches kept the shifts short intentionally to make sure no one got too cold.”
While heated benches provided some respite from the bitter cold, players tried different things to stay warm. They experimented with varieties of long-sleeved shirts under their pads, and some even tried to wear hats under their helmets, but the plan didn’t work.
And it was even worse for the goaltenders, who were stuck on the ice for most of the game and couldn’t warm up on the bench.
“Our goaltender, Mikka Kiprusoff, wore a full scuba diving suit under his equipment to stay warm” Kostopoulos said.
Despite the cold, Kostopoulos said the experience was one of the highlights of his career. Attendance exceeded 41,000. Players were allowed to bring their families onto the outdoor rink the day before the game and Kostopoulos’ Flames shutout the Canadiens, 4-0.
And the experience allowed players to re-live the pond hockey roots of their childhoods, to a degree.
“It was like pond hockey in the sense it was outdoors, but the ice was actually pretty good,” Kostopoulos said, before reflecting back to the bitter cold conditions. “It was just that freezing cold. We had a practice the day before and it was cold, our warmups before the game were cold.”
Several of the younger Wilkes-Barre/Scranton Penguins would cherish the chance to play in an NHL outdoor game, even if the temperatures can make for a challenging experience.
Dominik Simon carved his hockey background as a child in the Czech Republic playing on a pond near his house.
He said Saturday’s outdoor game reminded him of playing on the pond years ago.
“I always looked forward to the pond freezing. We’d play pond hockey all winter, and sometimes we used a tennis ball when we didn’t have a puck,” Simon said.
Only once was the pond ice perfect, Simon said, and most of the time they had to deal with handling the puck on a rough, wind-swept ice surface.
But Simon said that was a benefit.
“It helped me because you had those unexpected bounces to deal with,” he said.
And like Kostopoulos, Simon agreed that playing hockey outdoors can be a chilling experience.
“That was the hard part of it. You were always looking forward to going outside, and after 5 minutes on the ice your face was freezing and you had to go back in and drink some tea,” Simon said.
