Ice preparations begin at STAPLES Center

Early Monday morning, the maintenance crew at STAPLES Center began preparing the ice for the upcoming 2015-’16 LA Kings season.Once the LA Sparks wrapped up their WNBA contest on Sunday evening, the building was stripped down to it’s hockey skeleton – baring a blank concrete slab which will soon be supporting the Kings’ ice surface for the 15th time in the arena’s history.

We caught up with the building’s operations manager, George Rios, to get a quick rundown of the process that goes into building a fresh sheet of ice.

“This is our 15th year here making the ice; we’ve been open here since 1999. A lot of these guys who have been around our team, our operations team, they’ve been with us since…