Dan Craig, The NHL’s Iceman Goeth
By Scott Burnside
Pretty sure no one sets out to become the greatest ice maker in the world.
At least we’re sure Dan Craig, who started maintaining the ice at the local hockey arena in Jasper, Alberta, when he was a junior in high school, never imagined that making sure hockey players had a place to ply their trade would send him around the globe multiple times and make him an integral figure in some of the most memorable moments in hockey over the last 30 years.
But that’s exactly how it turned out.
If you watched a critical game in the NHL for the past 24 years or enjoyed the action at the 2002, 2006 and 2010 Olympics, especially if you enjoyed the spectacle of any of the Winter Classics or of the literally dozens of outdoor NHL games that dotted the NHL calendar since 2008, well, in some ways you have Dan Craig to thank.
His last game was Game 5 of the Stanley Cup Final in Tampa last summer when the Lightning finished off the Canadiens to complete a rare Stanley Cup repeat.
About a month ago, he was outside Toronto with his son, Mike, and Derek King, who now takes the keys to the NHL’s massive ice machine as the head of the NHL’s facilities department. They were preparing equipment for transport to Minnesota and the home of the 2022 Winter Classic at Target Field in Minneapolis.
It’s a game that Craig will attend only as a fan, if he chooses to attend at all. Should he attend, he will be a fan with a special vested interest, not so much in the outcome of the game as he will be in the quality of the playing surface.
“It’s not as weird as what people would think it would be for me,” Craig said in a recent interview.
Part of the Zen-ness with which Craig is approaching retirement – he has described it to others as ‘graduation’ as in graduating from working like a dog every day to something less grueling – comes from the fact he is handing the keys to the game’s inner machinery to people he has mentored for years.
Both Mike Craig and King, who has been making ice for the Jets in Winnipeg, have taken the lead in various outdoor games in recent years.
And of course there’s the fact Mike, who has been working outdoor games since the first Winter Classic in Buffalo in 2008, is Craig’s son. This also adds to the comfort Craig has in the transfer of power.
And, really, such is the way of hockey. It’s no different than when the rising superstar slowly takes over the dressing room and the ice from the previous generation’s stars.
Craig, 66, began looking after ice in Jasper, Alberta when he was 16 and a junior in high school. A year later he and a pal ran it full-time.
“It was just something we did,” Craig recalled.
He took arena jobs in British Columbia, then back to northern Alberta and then to the Edmonton Oilers.
“It was like going through the farm system,” Craig said.
And even though Craig’s work was the rink he always took time to build a backyard rink at home so his two boys and their pals could have a place to play that wasn’t too structured or too indoors.
Craig was first hired by the NHL as facilities manager and charged with bringing some uniformity to ice and playing conditions around the league almost a quarter of a century ago. It’s that role, as an educator and mentor to dozens and dozens of arena managers and workers around the hockey world, that remains one of his most important achievements.
“A lot of people don’t realize that was still happening while all these outdoor games were going on,” Craig said. “Those high-profile events ‘were just an added piece of the job description.’”
In the days and weeks since he announced his departure from professional ice making, Craig has received notes from around the hockey world from those people who have learned to embrace Craig’s long-time mantra: ‘excellence becomes tradition’.
In some ways those notes are every bit as important and are to be cherished every bit as much as the memories of building ice in Dodger Stadium, Fenway Park, Wrigley Field, Michigan Stadium (i.e. The Big House) or at Olympic tournaments in Salt Lake City, Turin and Vancouver.
“Those are the things for me,” Craig said. “Those are the untouchables for me.”
The first time Craig found himself outside North America as the NHL began its first tentative steps to broaden its global footprint was in Japan a year before NHL players would first take the ice at the 1998 Olympics in Nagano.
It was in many ways a humbling experience. Craig was working with staff who didn’t speak his language, trying to find things in totally foreign surroundings to make sure the season-opening games between Vancouver and Anaheim met NHL standards, even though Yoyogi Arena was perched on top of a former Olympic swimming pool and a diving stand loomed over the ice surface.
#OTD in 1997, @Canucks and @AnaheimDucks opened their seasons in Tokyo, Japan in the first-ever NHL game played outside of North America.
Led by goals from Pavel Bure and Mark Messier, Vancouver won 3-2. pic.twitter.com/E0LiRKQBQe
“I remember getting on plane coming home and literally saying I wouldn’t have wished that on anybody, but I am so glad of making it happen,” Craig said.
A few months later, thanks to a credentialing foul-up, Craig was at home watching the first-ever Olympic tournament featuring NHL players. He saw some things on his television screen in relation to the rink and the ice that needed tending to and then he recognized one of the staffers who had helped with the earlier games in Japan.
Craig faxed broadcaster Darren Pang, who was part of the Olympic broadcasting crew, with a message to pass along to the rink worker thousands of miles away.
Hey, you do what you can.
“You bring up all those events and games, every event has its own story,” Craig said.
Like London, fall of 2007, when defending Stanley Cup champion Anaheim was playing Los Angeles at the O2 Arena.
It wasn’t until they were well into the process of putting down ice when Craig discovered there was a hole in the floor along one of the blue lines about one foot by two feet which ran straight down into an electrical room that would not freeze.
Only when Craig ended up in the basement looking up was the mystery of the bare spot solved.
“And you go, yup, that’s a hole,” Craig said with a laugh. “I often say, whatever I need is in this building someplace,” he said. And it was so in London. After jerry-rigging some aluminum across the space the ice froze solid and the games went off without a hitch.
Well, sort of. After Craig got the right capping for the boards and proper ice resurfacers that would do an NHL-quality job.
“The first one that came off the truck I just looked at it and said, uh, we’re not using that,” he said.
But the key to Craig’s reputation as a man who got things done was in not letting his emotions get the better of him, at least not where other people could see it.
“You have to stay calm,” Craig said. “Okay, let me think through this. Where are we going? What are we doing? Who do we know that I can call to get something?”
Of all the thousands of games that Dan Craig oversaw, literally around the globe, there is one that will be forever part of his significant legacy in the game.
The first Winter Classic on Jan. 1, 2008, Ralph Wilson Stadium in Buffalo.
A little more than four years earlier, Craig had been part of the crew in Edmonton when the Oilers and Montreal Canadiens faced off at Commonwealth Stadium in November of 2003. That was more an Oiler production than a full-on NHL production. It was legendary given the arctic conditions that saw players fearing frostbite and Jose Theodore sporting a toque over his goalie mask in the Montreal net.
For a time that seemed like a one-and-done type event.
But the Winter Classic was something else altogether. It was the audacious brainchild of then NHL COO John Collins, who envisioned an event that would shoulder hockey onto the crowded holiday sports landscape in the United States. Collins wanted a celebration of the game in a grand setting that would attract the hard-to-reach casual hockey fan in the U.S.
He got exactly that and much, much more on Jan. 1 2008. But it took a Herculean effort from Craig and his staff to make it so.
Collins recalled arriving at Ralph Wilson Stadium the day before the Pittsburgh Penguins and host Buffalo Sabres were set to practice on the outdoor rink in preparation for that first Winter Classic. Craig and his crew had moved into the football complex literally as the NFL Buffalo Bills were departing for the offseason, after the Bills agreed at the outset to play Game 16 of the NFL regular season on the road.
Craig had not slept for most of the week. As Collins noted Craig had gone “full Grizzly Adams.”
As Collins made his way to the newly installed boards, Craig stopped in front of the league executive and glared at Collins.
“When I met his glare, he asked me to come out on the ice with him,” Collins recalled this week. “He took me to center ice, turned his back to the small crowd still marveling at the stadium decor, reached into his pocket and pulled out a silver metal cross pen and said, “Watch this” and proceeded to drop the pen. Instead of bouncing off the frozen ice it went straight through and disappeared.”
“I looked at Dan and said, ‘That’s not good,’” Collins said, “No it’s not and we will fix it and the ice will be ready for the game, but don’t ever do this to me again. I know exactly what we need if we are going to do this again. I’ll lay it out for you.” Then he told me to get off his ice that he had another 48 hours of work to do,” Collins added.
Craig did as he promised and the game went on. And while not without its flaws, with snow falling more heavily as the game went on and the ice conditions deteriorating, the league got its storybook ending with Sidney Crosby scoring on Ryan Miller in a shootout. Even now the images of that game – and they adorn the walls of the rinks in Buffalo and Pittsburgh and across the hockey landscape – take your breath away.
That first Winter Classic marked a turning point in the league in terms of profile and revenue generating and fan appeal.
“Maybe that’s the best compliment that you can give Dan,” Collins said. “He was the guy who figured out how to do all these games; in a baseball stadium, in a football stadium, in the Big House, three games in five days on each coast plus a follow-up game a few weeks later in Vancouver one month after staging a game in the Big House for 115,000 people.”
The 2014 Winter Classic at the Big House in Ann Arbor, Mich. was honored as Best Sports Event of the Year by the Sports Business Journal – the second time in five years the Winter Classic received such an honor.
“I saved the card that announced that we had won and gave it to Dan,” Collins said. “He was the first and biggest reason for the event to have happened at all.”
It wasn’t until after the final celebration at the end of the ’08 Winter Classic that Craig finally exhaled.
“This is big, really big,” Craig recalled thinking. “You knew that it was going to be big. You just didn’t know how magnificent it was going to be and the kind of footprint it was going to leave.”
But as great as it was, Craig recalls talking to Deputy Commissioner Bill Daly after and telling him it simply wasn’t good enough.
“My biggest thing is I always want our players to be on the best,” Craig said. And he told Deputy Commissioner Bill Daly and the rest of the NHL brass; this is not good.
“This is not the way this is supposed to be going,” he recalled.
The big takeaway from the postmortem was that the NHL needed to be in control of all aspects of these events not contracting out equipment and staff to make an NHL-ready rink come to life in a baseball stadium or football field.
“If we were going to put our best forward,” Craig said. “We had to do it ourselves.”
And so they did. Under Craig’s guidance the league invested in twin portable ice-making machines that became part of the narrative of the outdoor games that would follow.
“If we hadn’t had Dan and his staff and their expertise and we weren’t able to execute that game the way we did the Winter Classic would have started and ended there,” Daly told NHL.com’s Dan Rosen recently.
Each of these events since – and there have been 31 counting the first Heritage Classic in Edmonton in 2003 – has its own signature moment in spite of the common themes that run through all of them.
Craig likes to watch the players the day before the game, when they get to practice and then in most cases skate with their families.
“I say it all the time, all you need to do is to watch their eyes when they walk out,” Craig said.
And so now this particular adventure is at an end for Craig.
It’s not really Craig’s style to embrace the spotlight but rather refers to a line he remembers from the old Edmonton Oilers’ documentary The Boys On The Bus.
“Everything is a moment in time,” he said. “It’s just a moment in time and I was one of the very, very fortunate ones to be involved.”
And so an epilogue of sorts.
In recent years a number of older couples have moved out of Craig’s neighborhood outside the Twin Cities and families with kids have moved in.
Last winter, for the first time in 12 years given his heavy travel schedule, Craig put in his own backyard rink just as he did when his own kids were growing up in Edmonton.
And so, not long ago, the kids in the neighborhood were once again dropping by to ask if Craig was going to be building his backyard rink again this year.
Of course he is. What else would the world’s greatest maker of hockey ice be doing in the winter?