The basic issue causing the need for Thursday night and Friday daytime games is having too many divisions playing on too few sheets of ice.

Looking at the Schedule, the tourney basically uses 2 sheets for the bulk of the tourney that weekend. With 54 preliminary games @ 1.25 hours each that is 67.5 hours of ice. Divided by 2 sheets that is 33.75 hours on each sheet before Saturday night.

Even if you play 6 AM to 10:45 PM on Friday and Saturday, you could squeeze all of the games on Friday and Saturday, but if anything went wrong, oh boy would you be playing late!

I think they probably need to divide the tourney into 3 weekends if they want to eliminate the extra days off, but I doubt they would do it as running 3 weeks of tourneys is a lot more difficult than 2.