NHL ice guru faces natural challenges for NorCal outdoor game (Puck Daddy Interview)

Dan Craig may have the best nickname in hockey.

The NHL senior director of facilities operations is jokingly referred to by some as ‘007 below.’ The reason? Search for Dan Craig online and pictures of Daniel Craig (the most recent James Bond) come up.

The NHL’s Craig may not have a license to kill … but he has a license to … oh we’re not going to go there. But it’s a funny coincidence.

Anyway, Craig may have his toughest outdoor game challenge yet with the league’s Feb. 21 Stadium Series contest at Levi’s Stadium between the Los Angeles Kings and the San Jose Sharks.

The Bay Area is full of microclimates and different weather within an earshot of each other. For example San Francisco’s monthly high is 60 degrees Fahrenheit. The average low is 48 degrees with average precip of 4.61 inches.

Santa Clara, which is only 48 miles away has an average high of 62 degrees in February and an average low of 45 degrees and gets over an inch less of precipitation according to The Weather Channel.

Basically, predict the unpredictable for Craig, who is trying his best to deal with the changing forecasts. Per accuweather last week, the long-range model indicated thunderstorms for the Feb. 21 game. Now it’s supposed to be a calm, sunny day with a high of 66 and a low of 49. Go figure.

We talked with Craig as he prepared for the 7 p.m. local time contest, and asked him about making ice in a new location for the big game.

Q: How does the Bay Area provide a different challenge from other places?

CRAIG: I’m new to the area so I’m adapting every day as we go, right now I’m standing in bright sunshine and a beautiful day and a t-shirt, which is the same as Los Angeles (the site of last year’s outdoor game in California), so I’m approaching the next five days as I did in LA on our set up. We will be working through 7 or 8 p.m. every night just setting up our staging and the rest of our ice crew arrive Wednesday night. We’ll start putting down our ice then and we’re ready to go.

How do you look at the forecast? In an area like Santa Clara you have mountains and ocean. It can be very unpredictable…

That’s why we’ve done eight or 10 of these in unpredictable other climates and we just adapt as we go. Everybody has the same internet information we have. Everybody can see the storm systems coming, we just kind of watch them whether they come off the Pacific Ocean and hit us or if they come from the south and come up, we’ll monitor them and adapt as we go. We know with bright sunshine we’re not going to do any work during the day at all. Once the guys get everything set up, we start working at 4 p.m. and we’ll work until 4 a.m.

How much is LA a comparable?

Right now we have a very light layer of cloud here, but the sun is breaking out and it’s almost identical of how we set up at Dodger Stadium. The guys are putting the decking down now. We don’t see precipitation in the next five days. We’ll be spraying water and making ice by Friday night and we’ll just keep on monitoring the weather systems come the weekend.

How did you research this project? Was there anything different you had to do to prepare for it?

We do our weather patterns anywhere from 10-15 years out to kind of tell us what these two weeks are generally going to be. We do our average so we kind of know what’s coming, but it’s just like anything else. If you don’t know what storms are coming, you just know what the general climate is going to be this time of year and you make plans for that.

What’s the stress like in terms of the weather? I guess you have to make adjustments on the fly because that’s your job.

You’re right. It is a job and it’s not even a stress factor, it’s adapting and you’re prepared. That’s why we have the crew we have because it’s not just one person, it’s not just me. I have the final say in what goes on. Everyone knows what’s going to be happening and everybody adapts as they go and they know getting up in the morning what we’re going to be doing for the day.

Most of the time during the Winter Classic we do work during the day but if we know we’re going to have sunlight for three days in a row, we don’t work until 4 p.m., and everyone on our crew is very much aware of that.

I imagine it’s going to be overnight every day in that case because of the sunlight?

The guys arriving Wednesday have three days of working during the day and they know come Friday night we’re spraying water and working until 4 a.m., and then at 4 a.m. we put our tarps down so we don’t get caught by … we have to make sure everything is frozen up before we put our tarps down and before the sun comes up we want everything covered.

How do you prepare for sun in a new stadium?

We’ve done our charts, but we know the sun is totally off the field by 3 p.m. which is why at 3 p.m. is when we’ll take the tarps off and then by 4 p.m. we’ll be ready to spray water. We’ve already taken the sun out of the equation. It’s not like we come to work at noon and waiting for it to come off the field. We’re already prepared for that.

The fact that it’s a night game should help?

It helps me tremendously. If we were doing a 2 p.m. afternoon game, yes, I would be stressed …

Knowing that the sun is off the field by 3 p.m., we’re not even close to warmup. we’re solid we’re as good as we were at Dodger Stadium.

What’s the perfect gameday weather for this contest?

Anything below 55 degrees, that’s the way the equipment was designed and engineered was to handle ice up to 55 degrees. So anything that was under 55 we’re golden if we have no sunlight on it. That’s cooler than what we run in any NHL facility. Then we’re in good shape.

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Josh Cooper is an editor for Puck Daddy on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at puckdaddyblog@yahoo.com or follow him on Twitter! Follow @joshuacooper

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