New 3-on-3 hockey league with Penguins flavor made to be 'snackable'

Like any kid in the Pittsburgh suburbs who followed hockey, E.J. Johnston’s favorite Pittsburgh Penguins were obvious.

“Randy Carlyle, Michel Dion and Greg Millen.”

Huh?

“I’m going to date myself,” Johnston joked when naming three members of the franchise from the early 1980s before the arrival of icon Mario Lemieux.

Carlyle won the Norris Trophy as the league’s top defenseman in 1981, and Millen and Dion were goaltenders who each led the team to the playoffs.

But Johnston’s admiration of them went beyond their on-ice exploits.

His dad was their boss.

Eddie Johnston was the Penguins’ coach in the early 1980s, years before he became the franchise’s general manager and something of an institution in the organization.

Many of those Pittsburgh connections are being put into E.J. Johnston’s burgeoning endeavor, 3ICE, a three-on-three hockey league scheduled to begin in the late spring of 2021.

“I’m an entrepreneur,” said the younger Johnston, 47. “I love sport, and I love media. To me, this is a kind of a perfect storm of my skillset.”

Johnston plays hockey in his spare time and obviously grew up with it given his father’s vocation, but his professional skillset is more geared toward entertainment.

Formerly an executive with IMG, the global sports, events and talent management company, Johnston oversaw the agency’s fashion division.

He sees plenty of parallels between haute couture and hockey.

“The ice is the runway,” said Johnston, who serves as CEO of 3ICE. “The coaches are the designers, the players are the models, the fans are called fashionistas and media is media.”

The way Johnston describes it, 3ICE will be more of a media company than a hockey league.

The league will take arguably the most entertaining portion of a regular-season hockey game, three-on-three overtime, and present it to an audience that increasingly digests video in quick, easy-to-access formats such as YouTube, Twitter, Instagram or other online platforms.

So instead of watching cat videos or TikTok dance clips on your phone while in bed at 2 a.m., you could be viewing a compilation of perfectly executed two-on-one rushes.

“One of the internal mantras that we have is to be ‘snackable,’ ” said Johnston, who has worked for other media entities such as Fox Sports and Getty Images. “We like to be fun, innovative and ‘snackable.’ That’s what we think our brand is. What we mean by ‘snackable’ is short-form content that is easily shareable. You can digest and consume it quickly. It doesn’t have to be an hour long.

“For us, our game is going to be two eight-minute periods of running clock. So right then and there, you can condense a period down to down to a minute and a half or two minutes, probably, and get all the goals and the highlights. So that shareability, that ‘snackable’ form of content is really how the new media landscape has shaped out the last few years and we see it moving forward.

“You see people putting big bets on short-form content all over the place. It’s a really big internal mantra. Be ‘snackable’ and be fun, and let the fans share it as much as possible.”

Composed of eight teams, the league is expected to tour through traditional hockey markets in the Northeast and Midwest, as well as portions of Ontario and Quebec.

“From a structural standpoint, we’re using a touring model,” Johnston said. “So like the PGA Tour or Formula One, all of our teams will descend on a single city. We have eight teams, and we’re going to play a bracket-style tournament each week and determine a champion.”

Scheduled to take place following the 2021 Stanley Cup Final, 3ICE will have an eight-week “regular season” followed by a bye week then a championship.

The regular season will be carried by CBS Sports Network, and the championship is scheduled to be broadcast on CBS proper. Canadian broadcasters TSN and RDS also will be involved.

“Since our games are 16 minutes, with two eight-minute periods of running clock, they’ll all take place over the course of about three hours,” Johnston said. “So our broadcast will be about three hours, and that’s essentially the same as a baseball game or a regular hockey game.”

All eight teams are owned by a single entity with former Penguins general manager Craig Patrick serving as commissioner. On Wednesday, the league announced it had hired several former NHL stars including ex- Penguins John LeClair, Joe Mullen, Larry Murphy and Bryan Trottier.

And oh yeah, Eddie Johnston.

What type of on-ice talent will be in 3ICE?

“Almost exclusively ex-NHLers,” E.J. Johnston said. “Our prototypical guy is, I like to point to (Penguins forward) Conor Sheary. I loved him when he was (with the Penguins) the first time. For me, it’s that (5-foot-8, 5-foot-9 player), that waterbug who’s super fast with quick, fast hands, tic-tac-toe passing. It’s not that really that monster, that 250-pound defenseman. If the NHL was three-on-three all the time, then the Conor Shearys of the world would be the prototypical players.

“We want NHL pedigree, but we’re going to stay a little loose on some of this. If somebody really impresses us and never got a shot in the NHL for whatever reason, just always stayed in the (AHL) and was a little too small and can stick-handle like crazy, (he’ll get an opportunity).”

Having seen the success of similar leagues for basketball (The Big Three) and rugby sevens, Johnston believes there is an appetite for hockey in this format.

“The Big Three and these sort of compact versions of sports have all served as great data points for us,” he said. “So it’s been helpful to have these successes of these other short-format leagues as something we can point for as success models.

“I always thought hockey was a sport that could be more interesting, shown to more people.”

Follow the Penguins all season long.