A SPORTS DRAMA WITH AN UNCERTAIN FINISH
From the moment the National Basketball Association quickly and urgently suspended its season on Wednesday night, it seemed inevitable that the National Hockey League would have to do the same.
This led to another question: What happens, in a gate-driven league, when there are no gates?
Perhaps the fact there is no easy answer is what kept the NHL from acting swiftly. Wednesday night ended with no changes to its plans. On Thursday morning, teams were advised to scrap practices and meetings. Meanwhile, events large and small were dropping from the calendar, as organizers heeded the advice of health authorities trying to limit the spread of the no-longer-new coronavirus. NCAA conference tournaments were dropped. Major League
Soccer paused its season, as did the National Lacrosse League. The Juno Awards were scrubbed.
And then, finally, the NHL did the obvious thing. Around midday on the east coast, commissioner Gary Bettman announced the league would cease business for an uncertain period of time. “It is no longer appropriate to try to continue to play games at this time,” he said in a prepared statement that also said it was “likely” that someone in the NHL community would test positive for coronavirus at some point.
Just like that, a season in which five of Canada’s seven teams still had legitimate post-season aspirations was rendered static. All the usual intrigues of the spring, the playoff races, the Mcdavid-draisaitl Hart Trophy arguments, the question of whether the Toronto Maple Leafs would get knocked out by the Boston Bruins in the first or second round, it was all put on hold. There is nothing that puts the life-and-death approach that some take to pro sports in perspective like having to deal with actual lives and deaths.
It was, again, the only option. When it was revealed on
Wednesday night that Utah Jazz centre Rudy Gobert had tested positive for coronavirus, it took only a few seconds to do the math. The Jazz had just played in Cleveland, Boston, New York and Detroit, then played host to Toronto. Add in the teams those teams had since played, and much of the league had potentially come in contact with someone transmitting the virus. With NHL teams sharing facilities with NBA teams in many cities — road teams use the same dressing and training rooms, regardless of sport — the metaphorical reach of Gobert loomed as large as the seven-footer’s literal one.
That it took his diagnosis to spur these actions only underscores how naive the leagues had been with their half-measures that kept players a safe distance from the media while still allowing fans to pack their buildings. When the Jazz hosted the Raptors on Monday night, Gobert was ejected late in the game after a light tussle with Toronto’s OG Anunoby.
As Gobert walked off the court, he peeled off the protective sleeve on one arm and tossed it to a happy fan. He later mockingly touched all the microphones and recorders at a news conference and, according to an ESPN report, acted similarly around his teammates, one of whom also contracted the virus.
We have not heard if the NBA’S patient zero also liked to use everyone else’s coffee cups, but at this point you would not be surprised.
But just because the NHL’S shutdown decision was an obvious one in the end, it does not mean that the consequences will not be significant. The NBA’S national television deal pays it more than Us$2.6-billion annually, while the NHL gets less than a 10th of that from NBC. The NHL does have a much bigger TV deal in Canada, but it remains far more reliant on ticket sales for the bulk of its revenue. What happens when teams that operate at close to a break-even point lose a month of ticket sales? What happens on the sports networks that rely on hockey to fill their schedules? Poor Gino Reda is going to be reviewing his grocery list on an edition of That’s Hockey by next week.
At this point, and this is violating the First Rule of Column
Writing, who knows? We have no idea how any of this is going to play out. By Thursday afternoon, Major League Baseball had suspended spring training and pushed back its regular season by two weeks, in what seems like a fantastically optimistic hope that the global public health crisis of today will have petered out a month from now. The PGA Tour seems determined to carry on even without fans lining its fairways, a decision taken after consultation with U.S. President Donald Trump, who is about the single worst person to seek advice from on this matter.
And so, the pleasant distraction that sports usually provides from the stresses of life has instead become another way in which normalcy has been turned on its ear in these unprecedented times. The worst-case scenarios that these leagues were considering two days ago are now just scenarios.
It’s been said that sports can be tough to beat as an entertainment vehicle, since their drama is real drama. This feels like the one time you wish it didn’t have to be quite so real.