On the weekend, the big boy arrived in Edmonton.

For the past couple of weeks, the incredible new Rogers Place scoreboard was being assembled in Las Vegas.

Early this past week, it was then painted, dismantled, placed in trucks and shipped north to it’s palatial new home in Canada.

This week, the various pieces of the structure of the greatest scoreboard in the history of the NHL or NBA will be attached to the hoist that has been installed in the centre of Rogers Place.

Next week, all the LED components will arrive from Logan, Utah, and be put in place and it’ll come to life.

“When everybody sees the frame hanging there they will do what I did. They’ll say: ‘Holy,’ and then a swear word,” Oilers Entertainment Group scoreboard team member Vernon Mason said of his recent visit to Vegas to monitor the construction.

“Even though I designed this, the hair on my arms stood up. It was like, ‘Oh, my God, what have I done?’ ” added Mason, the vice-president of facilities and design for Aquila Productions — the company that has become part of Daryl Katz’ Oilers Entertainment Group. “It’s extraordinarily large. It’s over four stories high. Oh, man, it’s bigger than my house.

“It’s literally blue-line to blue-line.”

Mason said it’ll take the better part of three weeks to re-assemble the scoreboard structure and attach the LED video board components.

“The hoist just got installed a couple of days ago. When the pieces come, they’ll be hung off the hoist that holds the frame up as it gets built. Once the frame has been assembled, all the LED displays go onto the frame.”

The arrival of the scoreboard in Edmonton is no small event.

“It will be the highest quality video board and the largest in the NHL or the NBA, barring none,” swears Don Metz, the man who created Aquila and operated and produced content for nearly a quarter century of Edmonton scoreboards.

“And this scoreboard will stay that way for years to come. There are very few new arenas coming on stream. The scoreboard in Las Vegas is quite small compared to this. None of the existing arenas can retrofit a board this big.

“The board in Rogers Place is going to be 46-feet wide by 36-feet high on four sides,” said Metz.

“Some people may say the board in Tampa is wider. But that’s only two sides. It has really narrow little video boards at the end.”

And it’s not just the biggest. It’s the best.

“It’s full high-definition. The clarity of this board is second to none. We know we have the best resolution and highest quality board in any NHL building,” said Metz.

“It’s going to be special,” said Bob Nicholson, CEO and vice-chairman of the Oilers Entertainment Group.

“It’s going to take the fan experience to another level. It’s going to be the nicest scoreboard in the league. For the first while, I have absolutely no doubt, people are going to watch the game on the scoreboard for a while. It’ll take some getting used to.

“This is about getting our fans even more engaged and it should help our fans on the ice. The greater the atmosphere is, the more players want to play in that,” added Nicholson.

Once the structure is put back together on the hoist and the LED components and innards are attached, the scoreboard will be raised into position. When PCL turns over the keys, ice will be put in and they’ll play some hockey games to give the scoreboard it’s own training camp

“For hockey games, our game presentation staff — the guys who are going to be inheriting $110 million dollars of electronics in this building — are going to need five or six rehearsals,” says Susan Darrington, vice-president and GM of Rogers Place.

She said they’ll have something resembling actual games between the police and fire departments, for example.

“We’ll fire up all our LED products, the scoreboard, and really test drive the technical infrastructure of the building,” she said.

It’s difficult to quantify exactly what we’re dealing with here. But really, as incredible as this new scoreboard may be, it’s about more than that. It’s about the $110 million of electronic goodies as a whole. And consider the package they’re going to be part of.

“This scoreboard is going to be set into such an architectural marvel of a setting. Then you add to that all the technology,” said Stew McDonald, chief commercial officer of the Oilers Entertainment Group.

“It’s the largest true HD screen use of the game itself on the scoreboard. We’ll have full ice projection, which will be the latest and greatest. Until lately, teams were renting full ice projection just for special events for their season opener or all-star game. For us it’ll be permanent and we’ll have it to use on a game-in, game-out basis.

“Now we’ll have our production in house and involving people like Keith Hough and Vernon Mason, who were with us back in 1992-93.”

And this is where we introduce you to Rich Meyers, the 34-year-old judged the brightest young talent in the business who spent nine years with the Grand Rapids Griffins of the AHL and was brought up to the Oilers two years ago to prepare to be the one who gets to drive this big new beast.

“I get the keys to the Ferrari,” he raved.

“This is a very small industry. There are not too many people who do my job. The opportunity to open a new building is pretty rare. It’s an unbelievable experience to be able to be part of this,” said Meyers.

“We hired Rich two years ago to come in and get a sense of our fans in Rexall Place but mostly to be a lead for us to plan out how we’re going to utilize what we’re going to have here,” said MacDonald.

“Daryl Katz bought Aquila Productions and Don Metz has become senior advisor with Rich now building the content for Oilers game night. Vernon is building out the technical. And Don is there for a resource for all of them.

“It’ll work very much like it worked for the Rexall Farewell Night. It was Rich’s team that executed everything in the building that night but Don was heavily involved in co-ordinating and helping direct the floorshow. He’s just too valuable a resource not to take advantage of that.”

Meyers said he didn’t hesitate to make the move.

“The appeal for me was Rogers Place, hands down. At the time I got the call, my wife was pregnant with our first child and to leave family and friends was no small decision. But we jumped at it. It was Rogers Place.

“I’ve been fortunate enough to walk through a handful of times. It is absolutely incredible. I’ve been to about 100 arenas and stadiums and I’ve never seen anything like it.”

And there’s the challenge that goes with it, he adds.

“We have so many digital display canvases in various shapes with a lot of curves, it makes it a unique challenge on content creation.

“There are so many interesting things to look at in this building I just think fans’ minds are going to be blown away. It’s not just on the scoreboard cube inside the bowl. We have the state-of-the-art on-ice projection system, two LED rings, upper and lower halos. In the Winter Garden, there’s a kind of a whale-shaped board.

“We have over 1,200 TVs spread around the concourse areas and throughout the building. To give you context, the other day we took a tour of the new arena in Las Vegas and they have just over 800.”

In the past, in Rexall, most of the production involved freelance talent through Aquila. OEG is building a team of full-time employees.

“It’s an internal team here. Since the season ended, we’ve hired three more full-time employees and there’s potentially more down the road.

“There’s a lot of brain storming. We’re all involved in pretty intense training that started a couple of weeks ago and is going to go on until we open the building.”

Not many people are likely to ask you about pixels, but Meyers said the scoreboard and halos “feature a 6 mm pixel pitch compared to 18 mm on the Rexall LED ring.

“The best way to describe that is that will provide a ‘photo-realistic’ picture.”

There are other items, he says, which will illustrate the Rogers Place quality.

“On most nights at Rexall Place, we had four controllable cameras, and at Rogers Place we will have upwards of 12 controllable cameras, including one very special angle that no other NHL building has. It will allow our fans to view game action and replays like never before. These cameras will allow us the opportunity to show more replays, more Oilers fans, and allow us to capture true-HD footage for future use.”

One thing Meyers knows for sure.

“I can guarantee you that the show that you see Game #41 will look different than Game #1. We will continue to evolve, and unlike Rexall Place, we now have the tools at our disposal to deliver Oilers fans an incredible show. We’re working on creating some incredible content that is truly interactive, things that haven’t been seen in any arena in North America.

“We have some surprises but we want to keep them surprises. It’s going to be absolutely amazing.”

terry.jones@sunmedia.ca

Twitter.com/sunterryjones