Nicole Carpenter

Hockey ice is white because it's painted. Rinks freeze a thin base layer, spray it with white paint, then seal the paint under more ice. The league has done this since the 1940s so fans could follow a black puck. Then someone pointed a projector at it. It turns out hockey had accidentally built the best movie screen in sports. Matte white paint under a sheet of clear ice diffuses light almost perfectly, and the whole surface is dead flat. It's also enormous. An NHL rink is 200 feet by 85, about 17,000 square feet. A standard IMAX screen is around 4,000. A show like this takes roughly a dozen 20,000-lumen projectors hung in the rafters, aimed nearly straight down so the beams don't glare off the ice or bleed into the seats. Software warps and blends all of them into one picture that fits the rink's rounded corners pixel for pixel. The Devils put about $1 million into their rig a decade ago, and arenas across the league copied it. San Jose was always going to push this furthest. The Sharks have run the most famous entrance in hockey since the 90s, a 17-foot shark head lowered from the rafters with fog pouring out of its mouth and eyes glowing red. For thirty years the players skated out of the tank. Now the whole rink is the tank, and the sharks circling under their skates are just light bouncing off paint that was only ever there to make a puck visible.