CANADIAN DIVISION PLAN IN MURKY WATERS
League, players agree on start date, keeping teams home is yet another issue
The NHL and the NHL Players' Association have reached a tentative agreement to start the regular season on Jan. 13, but there's still work to be done to make sure there's an all-canadian division.
While the NHL and the union wrapped up the details of their deal on Friday, the league still has to work out the details of an agreement with the Canadian government, the provinces and local officials to allow the teams to play home games north of the border.
The players met on Friday night to approve the 56-game schedule.
Meanwhile, Lisa Macleod, Ontario's minister of heritage, sport, tourism and culture, confirmed to Postmedia that she was talking with officials from the Toronto Maple Leafs and Ottawa Senators on Friday morning to explore options for keeping the teams in Canada for the 2020-21 campaign.
The Ottawa-area MPP was responding to reports on Thursday that the NHL has informed the seven Canadian teams — including the Vancouver Canucks, Calgary Flames, Edmonton Oilers, Winnipeg Jets and Montreal Canadiens — they may be forced to play in the United States this season unless provincial health authorities agree to allow them to take to the ice in their home cites.
The NHL would like the seven teams to play in an all-canadian division, but at this point, that's not possible because the league doesn't have the go-ahead from all five provinces. A league source said Friday night those talks will continue through the weekend and into next week.
“I had a good conversation with the Leafs and the Senators this morning,” Macleod said during a phone interview on Friday. “The option that they would prefer is to have the Canadian division. The complications with that are, you're not just dealing with provincial health units, you're also dealing with the local municipalities and their health units.
“In Ottawa and Toronto, we're dealing with the local public health units, but at the same time, the chief medical health officer of Ontario. The same thing would happen with Calgary and the other provinces.
“The preference would be to have that division and we're going to continue to work with them.”
Macleod said her understanding is that the health units in all five provinces and the seven cities have to be on board to make an all-canadian division work.
“If one Canadian city was unable to proceed, then that would probably be a game-changer for an all-canadian division,” Macleod said. “It's important that we all understand where everybody else is at. That's kind of an important conversation. For example, if six of the seven teams were in agreement but the seventh wasn't, that's a concern for the league.”
Macleod said she was going to meet with Steven Guilbault, the federal minister of heritage, on Friday to see where the other provinces stood and determine if everybody is “aligned” on this issue.
“I want to see what the line of sight is across the country with our other sport ministers, and what other governments are looking at with their public health units,” Macleod said. “The take-away I got is, all options are on the table (for the NHL) but the preference, in a safe way, is to resume the NHL in Canada with Canadian teams, if that's acceptable to our public health officers.”
If the Leafs, Senators, Habs, Flames, Oilers, Jets and Canucks can't get clearance, then the idea of an all-canadian division will likely be scrapped and they will play a full season out of
U.S. cities, much the same way the NBA'S Toronto Raptors will spend this year at Amalie Arena in Tampa, Fla.
Last summer, the province of Ontario was willing to allow the Toronto Blue Jays to host games without fans at the Rogers Centre, but the Canadian government was unwilling to waive the 14-day quarantine rules for teams coming from the U.S. As a result, the Jays played their season based in Buffalo.
The possibility exists that the NHL could use Toronto and Edmonton as hub cities in the event they can't get a deal done with the provinces.
“We were happy to be involved with the hub-city model in Toronto (last summer) and I considered that a massive success from a health standpoint,” Macleod said.
“That was a safer period of time, and right now, it is very different with where we're at with COVID-19. It's comparing apples to oranges, but it was successful, and I think it provided a great deal of pride for people across the province.
“With respect to MLB, that was a different scenario, because they were predominantly playing American teams and that was tough with the border. My preference is that this COVID-19 would end and we could watch our teams at the arenas, but that won't happen for a long time. We're going to take our advice with our chief medical officer of health and keep working with them.”
The biggest issue is that the spread of the novel coronavirus is still raging.
“We're now in a very different period with COVID-19, with the second wave coming on far stronger than the first,” Macleod said. “The other challenge is, just even within Ontario, Ottawa's public health unit is in orange (zone) while Toronto is grey lockdown. It's very complex when you're dealing with all the public health units.”
Macleod said the spread of the virus has made planning and timetables difficult.
“Everybody can have a start date, but most of this is out of our control, given the spread of the virus,” Macleod said. “There are so many issues that you contend with: The local health issues, the sanitation requirements, the protocols that are in place, and the rapid testing required.
“The one thing you have when you're dealing with professional sports is the resources that come. So they were equipped to do a bubble and they might be equipped, even more so, to have a return to play. I couldn't make that determination and I couldn't predict it because there are so many moving parts.”