Many issues if NHL were to return this season
Almost five weeks ago, Ottawa Senators goaltender Craig Anderson first addressed the possibility of playing an NHL game without fans in the stands, but he could never have anticipated the proposal for summer hockey making the rounds this week.
Anderson’s comments came following the Senators’ 2-1 overtime victory over the Sharks at the SAP Center in San Jose on March 7. At the time, Anderson thought a contest without spectators might be a one- off, because Silicon Valley was an early North American hot spot for the novel coronavirus.
“I thought it would be cool,” Anderson said of a game that has since gained significance because the Sharks organization and its fans dismissed loud recommendations from area health officials to avoid large public gatherings.
“It’s something different. So many times, you get stuck in a routine. So, when the out of the ordinary happens, it makes it more memorable. Five years from now, when you talk about a game, you’re not going to talk about the game that you won 2-1 in overtime. You’re talking about the game when there were no fans there. Those kind of memories stick out in the brain for a reason.”
As it turns out, the lasting memories of that California road trip, which also included stops in Anaheim on March 10 and Los Angeles on
March 11, will be something else altogether. Five Senators players, one additional staff member and TSN-1200 analyst Gord Wilson have since tested positive for COVID-19.
Three members of the Colorado Avalanche, who also played in San Jose on March 8 and in Los Angeles on March 9, have also tested positive for the virus.
The pandemic has since changed our world, testing the strength of how our governments, our health- care systems and our economies have dealt with the crisis. It has also become a test of our patience in waiting and wondering if and when our lives will fall back into a routine.
In the big picture of the rash of job losses, the collapse of businesses and the trillion- dollar recovery efforts, the return of professional sports does seem insignificant.
When the games do come back, however, it will be a nod toward some much-needed normalcy.
All of the above helps explain hope that the NHL could possibly finish out the 2019-20 season and or playoffs well into the summer, playing without fans in the seats at neutral site arenas in Saskatoon, Grand Forks, N.C., or other markets where the virus has been relatively well contained.
While Anderson was talking in early March about a short- term fix in a select area, the notion of a series of games played in isolation — first reported by Sportsnet’s Elliotte Friedman — and similar to the Major League Baseball suggestion of opening a shortened season within a self- contained, no- fans bubble in Phoenix, is out of the arena thinking.
On the surface, there are a hundred reasons why playing games in isolation would seem to make little sense. The safest and healthiest option for everyone involved would be for the league to simply wash its hands of the 2019- 20 season and begin preparations for a full 82-game season in 2020-21.
There are a series of significant questions on how it would be possible to protect players, team staff, building staff and hotel staff. The cities involved would need to sign off on exempting the NHL from physical- distancing rules that apply to the rest of the community and there would need to be agreements on how local health resources would be utilized to test players.
Yet if there’s any hope for the NHL to recoup some dollars from their enormous advertising and TV broadcast deals, the league isn’t going to quietly skate away without exploring all options.
Hence, NHL commissioner Gary Bettman’s comments this week.
“I think right now there’s too much uncertainty,” he said in an interview with NBCSN on Tuesday, which came on the heels of a conversation U. S. President Donald Trump held on the weekend with the leaders of North America’s major professional sports leagues. “Hopefully, we’ll all know more by the end of April. From an NHL standpoint, we’re viewing all of our options. We want to be ready to go as soon as we get a green light. Nothing’s been ruled in, nothing’s been ruled out.”
Actually, some things have been ruled out. Calgary’s ban on all public gatherings, including professional sports, extends to at least June 30, meaning the Flames can’t play at home until then.
There’s also a blanket prohibition on outdoor group activity in Ottawa, Toronto and Montreal until July. Forget about New York as the host for major sporting events. Throughout North America, we’ve yet to hit the peak of COVID-19 deaths.
The idea of the NHL returning to action anywhere in the summer remains a long- shot, a far cry from what Anderson and the rest of us thought in early March.