The NHL returns to the ice: Oilers open camp with 56 players in Edmonton
The 2026-27 NHL season is underway — even if no games have been played yet. Training camps opened across North America this week, and the Edmonton Oilers gathered 56 players at Rogers Place on September 16 for medicals and the first skates of the fall. Preseason games begin this weekend; the 32-team regular season drops the puck in early October.
Camp week is the most demanding week of the year for an ice surface. After a summer of concerts and events, ice crews rebuild the sheet from scratch: floor flatness, refrigeration capacity, humidity control and days of flooding before the first player takes a full stride. Freshly sharpened blades and hundred-kilogram players forgive nothing — soft or uneven ice shows immediately.
Rogers Place, opened in 2016, remains one of the league’s most modern arenas and hosts more than 18,000 fans on every Oilers game night. It is the same equation any operator faces, from NHL arenas to the municipal rink: an ice base that stays hard, flat and energy-efficient for 82 games.
That is exactly the work Napapiri has done since 1993. With more than 30 years building real-ice rinks for events, municipalities and clubs worldwide, we know it first-hand: the engineering that carries a professional preseason is the same that carries a city rink’s first season.
Photo: Alexscuccato, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.
