Fast-paced 3ICE league coming to Pittsburgh promises energy, skill

3ICE's tagline is "the best part of hockey."

3ICE, a new summer hockey league, is the creation of E.J. Johnston, son of former Penguins coach and general manager Eddie Johnston.

Looking to capitalize on the excitement and fast pace that NHL overtime brings, 3ICE travels across North America playing a tournament of three-on-three games each week.

Pittsburgh is the next stop on the league's schedule, with games coming to PPG Paints Arena on July 23 at 3 p.m.

Each tour stop follows the same six-game format: 3 games in the opening round, then 2 semi-finals, then a championship game. Games are two eight-minute halves with running clocks, with the clock only pausing for penalties and injuries. Instead of power plays, teams are awarded penalty shots after each infraction, with coaches allowed to pick their shooters. If the game is still tied after regulation, the game goes to sudden-death, one-round shootouts.

All six games get completed in three hours or less each week.

The six teams in the league are named for their coaches, a group featuring a number of former Penguins and members of the Hockey Hall of Fame: Joe Mullen, Bryan Trottier, Larry Murphy, John LeClair, Grant Fuhr and Guy Carbonneau.

3ICE

With ex-Penguins general manager Craig Patrick serving as the league's commissioner and Steve Mears and Bob Errey serving as the league's play-by-play broadcasters, there's no shortage of Penguins ties to the league, and that extends onto the ice as well.

The players in 3ICE are primarily younger players, most of whom currently play in the minor leagues or leagues in Europe.

Several ex-Penguins came out of retirement to play in the league: Jeff Taffe, Bobby Farnham, and Ryan Malone.

I spoke with Farnham, Malone and Trottier about what fans can expect to see from 3ICE when it comes to Pittsburgh next week.

"The kids are very creative and very skilled and have good energy," Trottier said. "If I was younger, I'd be on the ice. (laughs) It's quick. It's transition. It's catching the other team off guard. You know, two-on-ones, breakaways, lots of shots, generating chances. You make the goalie go to bed with nightmares."

That creativity is evident from the highlights each week. Earlier this month a 3ICE shootout goal from ex-Nailers forward Brandon Hawkins rightfully earned the top spot on the SportsCenter Top Ten list:

Farnham described the style as "pretty back and forth" as a result of all the open ice.

"It's been fun to watch," he said. "I'm still trying to adapt and understand the nuances myself."

Malone said that one of the adjustments for players has been learning how to pace themselves with the challenge of potentially playing as many as three games in one day, with periods of waiting in-between.

"Normal overtime, you lay it on the line for a few shifts, it's over in five minutes," Malone explained. "But with the round-robin format, you might have to sit in between games a little longer, or hop right back out there. So you're kind of making sure you definitely aren't getting stuck on the ice longer than a minute, just because it's hard to recover after that extended shift. You try to keep your shift short and just kind of pace yourself through the thing. I think the guys have a good tempo down and it's definitely getting a little more feisty each week as we go here, which is always good."

It's not hard for the players to find that feistiness. There's a prize pool of money for each city, with teams earning more depending on how far they make it in each week's tournament. It's no small chunk of change, either. Guys want to win.

"We're not talking hundreds," Trottier said. "It's thousands, it means something."

Malone, now 42, said that he first heard about 3ICE a couple of years ago from his father and former Penguin Greg Malone, who had heard about it from Patrick and Johnston. Malone retired from hockey after the 2014-15 season (though he did come back for a 12-game stint in the AHL in 2017-18), and assumed that 3ICE wouldn't have interest in having him. The commissioner disagreed.

"I heard they were looking for younger and speedier guys, so I thought my chances were done," Malone said. "Then I was invited to Mario Lemieux's Fantasy Camp, and Craig (Patrick) and a few of the coaches from the league were there. They were like, 'Geez, you can still move around pretty good, you're in great shape, so maybe you'd like to give it a shot?' I don't think I can turn down an opportunity to try to play hockey again. So it has been great."

Malone never got a chance to play 3-on-3 during his career -- the NHL changed to 3-on-3 overtime the year after his last NHL season. He wasn't quite sure at first how to prepare for 3ICE.

"I started doing a few squats again," Malone said, "I was like, 'What am I doing?' (laughs) Just to strengthen the legs, I actually trained for a Brazilian Jiu Jitsu tournament. So like my lungs and stuff, I feel good. It was more getting those skating legs a little stronger, but I am feeling pretty good."

Farnham, 33, last played in the 2019-20 season for the Belfast Giants of the British EIHL. It was in Belfast where Farnham was teammates with Patrick Mullen -- son of Joey Mullen. Farnham heard about the league from Patrick, and attended the tryouts in the spring and made the cut. The AHL had 3-on-3 for a number of years when Farnham was playing there, though he laughed that he "probably didn't get a lot of shifts" in overtime, given his role. 

I asked Farnham if there was any fighting in this league. There isn't, and that's one of the reasons he came out of retirement to play in the league.

"Thank goodness, no," he said with a laugh. "I think that was a huge sell for me in this league, to be able to try to play offense and play in this new format. This is the last professional hockey thing that I'm ever going to be able to do, having stopped playing during the pandemic. It gave me another opportunity. I'm pretty happy that there's no fighting, even though that edge, you feel it come out at times. I'm pretty happy that this is minimal contact and no fighting."

The coaches held a draft following the tryouts, and Trottier selected Farnham for his team and named him a co-captain of Team Trottier.

"Bobby's a good, hard-working kid with great skill at both ends of the ice," Trottier told me. "He does a lot of a lot of things. He's very skilled, tense very focused."

Eddie Johnston was the one who recruited Trottier to be a coach. Trottier had no desire to get back into coaching, having last worked as an assistant in the NHL in the 2014-15 season. I asked him if he missed coaching at all, and his response was a quick, "No, no not at all." But Johnston sold him on being a coach with the promise of exciting, fast-paced hockey.

"I said it sounds very intriguing and fun, exciting," Trottier said. "It's like overtime in the NHL all the time."

Trottier is also relishing the opportunity to coach against some of his former teammates and opponents from his playing days.

"No chirping, the guys are really tight," he said of the camaraderie between the coaches. "You know, it's almost like, I don't want to beat Joe Mullen. I don't want to beat Larry Murphy. I don't want to beat Carbonneau anymore. My team wants to win, and that's great. I just gotta figure out a way to be the nice guy in this whole thing."

When 3ICE comes to Pittsburgh next week, it'll be a homecoming of sorts for the coaches and a number of former Penguins. Farnham played parts of four seasons in the Penguins organization, and hasn't played a "home" game in Pittsburgh since being claimed off waivers by the Devils in the 2015-16 season.

He can't wait to be back at PPG Paints Arena.

"That organization is really home to me in a lot of ways," Farnham said. "Just having come up my first three, four years pro, I feel so engrained in and I think so highly of the organization, just on so many levels, just the way we were treated. I played in Wheeling, I played in Wilkes-Barre, I played in Pittsburgh. That's the organization that gave me my opportunity, my chance to play. I've always admired it, it's very well-run. It's very professional. They value winning, and they value all the right things about what a sports business is and a sports team culture is throughout their entire organization. So getting to come back and see some of the fans who were really so good to me for playing very few games in Pittsburgh, they kind of accepted me with open arms in Wilkes-Barre and in Pittsburgh. It'll be a pretty cool opportunity."

Coming to Pittsburgh will be all the more special for Pittsburgh-native Malone, who is getting the opportunity to play in front of his hometown crowd one more time. And he's hoping to help grow 3ICE into something that thrives after he retires for good.

"I'm beyond excited," Malone said of coming home. "I can't really even believe I'm playing hockey again, and so I feel very grateful for the opportunity to play this game I love again on a competitive level. Coming out of retirement to play, really it's just to get it out there for the other kids or the pro that may be just retiring that might want to have a fun summer, bring his kids. We're just trying to get it on the map for these other players to take advantage of."

Tickets for the July 23 3ICE games in Pittsburgh can be found here.