NWHL season is two-week sprint
Tyler Tumminia has lost plenty of sleep trying to get the National Women’s Hockey League back on the ice. But the interim commissioner doesn’t have to wait any longer. The NWHL, which features the Toronto Six as its first Canadian team, goes full bubble hockey Saturday when its two-week sprint of a season begins in a quarantined environment in Lake Placid, N.Y.
Each of the six teams plays five games in eight days followed by the playoffs, with the semifinals and final airing on national television in the U.S. and most games streamed on Twitch in Canada. It’s a chance to showcase the sport and hand out the Isobel Cup after the NWHL couldn’t complete last season because of the pandemic.
“This is a huge event to choreograph,” Tumminia said. “This is the first time we’re learning how to work in a contained environment, restricted environment like this with new rules that have been thrown on us, and happily so, to be able to protect our athletes. It’s a huge learning curve.”
The league thinks it can make it work with the same kind of COVID-19 testing the NBA used in its Disney World bubble. Players, coaches and staff will essentially be limited to a hotel and Herb Brooks Arena, the site of the 1980 U.S. Olympic “Miracle on Ice” that serves as a historic setting for a unique season.
“Hopefully this thing will not need to happen again — going into a bubble — and we can have regular seasons again,” Metropolitan Riveters coach Ivo Mocek said. “But I believe this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for the players.”
Those players “have been waiting a really long time for a game day,” Boston’s Christina Putigna said, though they’ve never experienced something like this. The teams that get to the final Feb. 5 could play nine games in 14 days, and Buffalo defender Marie-Jo Pelletier expects “the legs are definitely going to be burning by the end of it.”
It will be worth it for a chance at a championship.
“The way we’ve thought about this bubble is that it’s going to be a grind and when it comes down to it, it’s all about being able to overcome that physical and mental fatigue and adversity,” Boston Pride captain Jillian Dempsey said. “It’s really going to be who is going to be the last team standing, who’s going to have the legs, who’s going to have the heart when it comes down to it in the end.”
The end will also be shown on NBC Sports Network, a milestone for the NWHL to get that level of exposure in the U.S. Connecticut’s Hanna Beattie said there was “definitely an added incentive” to reach the semifinals because of that spotlight.
“Our players have earned it,” said Boston president Hayley Moore, who was recently named vice-president of hockey operations for the American Hockey League. “This is going to be one of the biggest stages they’ve ever been able to play on.”
And that’s even without the dozens of U.S. and Canadian national team players who are instead members of the Professional Women’s Hockey Players Association. The NWHL still has star power to put on display.