The Washington Capitals and Washington Wizards advancing in the playoffs extended seasons for more than just the teams. Facility operators at Verizon Center continue their grind of flipping from an NBA-ready arena to an NHL one. Adam Sinclair, vice president of operations, and Dave Touhey, senior vice president and general manager, sat on the Capitals’ home bench and talked with The Washington Times about the process of flipping the floors between the sports.
Question: How long does the actual conversion take and what does the process entail on back-to-back games?
Dave Touhey: Back-to-back days is normal. We do it all season long.
Adam Sinclair: Typically, we would start right after the game tearing everything down, whether it was basketball or hockey. We have a crew of about 30 guys on our normal nightly calls that would come in. Typically, conversion takes us between 4.5 [and] five hours on a normal night.
Q: Do you complete everything during the overnight conversion?
AS: There’s obviously set up during the day, but the bulk of the hockey and basketball changeovers are [finished] at 5 in the morning. So, we’ll start at midnight typically. Our calls are at midnight and our crews will be out of here at 5 or 6, at the latest. Our day crew will come in and do kind of set up of the scoreboard and the finish off. But, the conversion process, they’ll be done that morning.
Q: Which is more difficult, basketball to hockey or the other way?
AS: Probably hockey to basketball. It’s just more tear down. You have obviously glass, taking everything down and out. It takes us a little longer to go from hockey to basketball.
Q: Is the basketball floor above the ice?
AS: Yes. The ice cover is an inch thick. The basketball floor goes directly on top of that. The basketball floor is four-inch raised floor. It’s 15 rows of 15 pieces that goes directly on top of the ice cover.
Q: When you pull it apart, how does it stack, where does it go?
AS: It comes off in the 15 rows it goes down in. They’re all in alphabetical order. We split them between two store rooms. An east end store room and west end store room. We can bring it out on both sides. Our floor has the capability to starting in the middle row and building off each side.
Q: Does the ice underneath the wood influence the feel of the floor?
DT: No. All NBA buildings have one of three manufactured portable basketball floors, meaning that it comes up and down. A lot of colleges play on a fixed basketball floor. But all NBA teams, no one has a fixed basketball floor, even if they don’t have a hockey team where they don’t play over ice. A lot of NBA teams play in an arena that might have a minor league hockey team or other things going on where they pull the basketball floor up. Back in the day, the old Boston Garden, the parquet was famous for Larry Bird knowing every dead spot. I don’t know if that was a little bit of lore or if there was any realness to that — probably a mixture of both — but, our floor is brand new this year. It’s a brand-new system. It goes together with a clasp system now. It used to go together with pins. You would fix the pieces together and hold them with a pin. Now, it’s more like the buckle on a ski boot where it hooks together and you buckle it in so it snugs it in. It does make for kind of a more seamless floor. When you walk it, you really can’t tell where the edges are.
Q: You put in the new floor before the season started?
DT: Yeah. We’ve had that all season.
Q: Who makes that floor?
DT: Ours is a Robbins.
Q: How much does it cost?
AS: It was about $115,000 before trade-in.
Q: The main difference between the old and new floor is how the pieces interlock?
DT: The floors have so many times you can sand them down and reface them, repaint them a different color, or put a new coat of varnish on. Every time you sand down, you’re taking a little bit more wood away. So, ours wasn’t quite there yet. We wanted to get a new floor — you can trade in the old floor.
Q: How old was the old floor?
AS: Actually, it was the old [Los Angeles] Lakers floor. So, we guessed it was actually 15 to 17.
DT: But we had only had it for 10, I think.
Q: You bought it from the Lakers?
AS: Back when we purchased it, the Lakers wanted to get a new floor or something was wrong with the paint job. My predecessor, Bill [Harpole], ended up engaging with them in terms of buying their floor. We purchased it, shipped it off to Robbins, who is the manufacturer, got a complete new paint job and that ended up being the Wizards’ floor for about 10 seasons. The NBA mandated last season that you should replace your floor every 10 years. Anything past the 10th year, you have to get a waiver. So, typically a lifespan they’d like to see is 10 years, unless you get a waiver from them that it is still playable, still usable.
Q: What’s the process for maintaining the floor?
AS: Typically, after the season, we’ll have any major repairs or big dings resurfacing or recoating. During the season, our in-house crew, if there’s a nick in the corner, a little ding, they can repair that. We have parts in house that we can repair the corner pieces. We keep paint on hand, varnish.
Q: What are the complications of maintaining the ice?
DT: You can see the ice now and the reason why it’s warmer in here than Monday [during Game 7] is because this covering is down. We have to run the ice chillers a lot less. When we put the ice floor down and we have a long break, it’s saving a lot on the building because we’re not keeping the building as cool.
Q: A few NBA players mentioned this is sometimes a cool building.
DT: The NBA has guidelines where they want to see the temperature and humidity. We’re always right in the middle of those numbers. We’re never too far to either end. The league wants to try to maintain the same environment.
Q: What are those numbers?
AS: The NHL is 60/40 — like, 60 degrees and 40 percent humidity. The NBA is 68, 72 [degrees] and I think it’s 40, 50 percent [humidity].
DT: We run a report that shows both of them during the game. Obviously, once you start opening doors and letting 20,000 people in, the outside temperature will change that.
Q: Anything different in the playoffs?
DT: We run pretty much the same way. Even if we go back-to-back-to-back, depending on what happens with games that are completely out of our control and how many it goes — it’s just a waiting game. But, if we end up going back-to-back-to-back, with four games in a row, it’s what we end up doing during the year. The plus side for all of us is we have a few days with no events right now to rest up for it, and then we could go four strong, then we’d have a break again. You’re kind of drinking out of a fire hose for four days, but then you get to sit back and relax a little bit.
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