Unfinished Olympic ice hockey arena branded dangerous amid NHL relocation call to protect players

Major concerns have been raised about the main Winter Olympic ice hockey arena just two months before the first match.

Italy is hosting the prestigious tournament with a purpose-built 16,000-seat stadium called the Milano Santagiulia Ice Hockey Arena almost complete.

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Despite being built specifically for hockey, there isn’t enough room for the surface to meet the minimum size requirement in the NHL.

The International Ice Hockey Federation approved a 196.85-foot by 85.3-foot, reports The Athletic — that is over three feet shorter than the 200-foot by 85-foot standard for NHL arenas.

Players have taken part in previously Olympics where the venues have a shorter length, but the width was increased significantly as is typical in international games.

The agreement between the NHL, NHL Players’ Association, International Olympic Committee and IIHF for the Milan Games was based on the surface meeting the specifications used in the majority of North American stadiums.

After a brutal 4 Nations tournament in February saw some of the fiercest hockey ever played at Boston’s TD Garden, the lack of room is a genuine concern for players.

“If we learned anything from the 4 Nations, it was like, I don’t want to say mistake-free hockey, but the checking, there was no room,” U.S. men’s Olympic team general manager Bill Guerin told The Athletic in October.

Team Canada assistant coach Pete DeBoer was no impressed.

“I don’t understand how that happened,” he told Fan 590 in Toronto.

Santagiulia Arena is set to host 33 games during the Olympics, including the men’s and women’s gold-medal matches.

Another major hurdle lies in the fact that construction is ongoing.

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A December test even has been pushed back to January and there is no alternative option.

“There is no Plan B,” Andrea Francisi, the chief Games operations officer for Milan-Cortina, told The Associated Press. “So necessarily we have to be able to organize the competition in an impeccable manner at Santagiulia.

“There are daily updates in the sense that our team is there working every day. The companies which are involved with the building of the facility have sped up their work significantly.

“We’re monitoring all that daily together with them, there’s great collaboration between us, we’re creating a coordinated plan between their work and our preparations and for the moment we’re healthily optimistic, but 100 percent we’ll do it.”

Former NHL star turned analyst Paul Bissonnette put forward his own radical solution.

“If they can’t get that rink figured out, I think they need to move the [Olympics] hockey portion back to North America,” Biz Nasty said on TNT Sports.

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NHL representatives Derek King and Dean Matsuzaki visited Milan to check in and appear to be hopeful.

“It appears that positive forward progress is being made with respect to the necessary hockey-related facilities in Milan,” deputy commissioner Bill Daly told The Athletic’s Pierre LeBrun in November. “We intend to continue to monitor progress as we get closer to the planned test events and the Games themselves.”

The IOC expects the stadium to be complete by mid-December.

A women’s preliminary round game between Italy and France on February 5 is the first scheduled contest.