Upcoming season will be unique
Getting through it as safely and cheaply as possible appears to be guiding principle
Get your asterisks ready again.
If you thought this year's Stanley Cup playoffs, which featured far too many teams and not enough fans, was a pale replica of the real thing, then you're probably not going to be thrilled with what NHL commissioner Gary Bettman is planning for the upcoming season.
A 56-game schedule. An all-canadian Division. Temperature checks following bodychecks.
That last one was just a joke. But purists, be warned. The 2020-21 season isn't going to be like anything you've seen before.
The good news is that hockey is coming back. After weeks of negotiations over how much money the players and the owners will lose in a season played in empty arenas, it looks like training camps will be opening three weeks from now and the season will start sometime on or around Jan. 13.
The bad news is that, from the schedule to the realigned divisions to possibly holding games outdoors or in hub cities, it looks like the NHL is making this up as it goes along.
Then again, we said the same thing when Bettman unveiled his plan for the playoffs back in May. At least that was just a twomonth venture with everyone stuck inside a couple of impenetrable bubbles.
This is a different beast altogether. This is a 56-game schedule, played in 31 cities across Canada and the United States, while COVID-19 cases are spiking out of control.
We still don't know how the league plans to do this, not with California state officials forcing the San Francisco 49ers to play their home games in Arizona and with Winnipeg and Montreal stuck in the COVID-19 red zone. Not with numbers expected to get even worse after the holidays.
A vaccine — or vaccines — may be on its way. But they're not coming by Christmas. And Auston Matthews and Connor Mcdavid aren't getting it before your grandma does.
So, the NHL is getting creative. There's talk of shortening the season and expanding the rosters and limiting travel. There's talk of hub cities and holding outdoor games.
The plan seems built on one principle: get through this season as safely and cheaply as possibly.
Who knows? The league might be on to something.
Maybe chopping the season down from 82 to 56 games will not only save money, but will also make every one of those games competitive. Maybe combining all the Canadian teams into a seven-team division will not only decrease exposure to the virus, but also will increase ratings across the country.
Maybe the bragging rights that come with winning the Cancon Cup or whatever the winner of the all-canadian division is called will be more noteworthy than claiming the actual Stanley Cup. Based on how many of you actually watched the Tampa Bay Lightning win the Stanley Cup this year, that's not really saying much.
As much as the league and the players have to be commended for pulling off a successful playoffs that featured not a single positive case of COVID-19, at the end of the day, it was one of the least-watched post-season tournaments in NHL history. The quality of hockey wasn't the problem. It was that it looked so different than what we're used to .
Part of that was because it was held in the middle of summer, with no fans in the building, at a time when hockey was fighting baseball, basketball and other sports for viewers. There was no atmosphere. Not enough of us cared.
Putting all the Canadian teams together in one division could change that. Although you have to ask yourself whether watching Winnipeg and Ottawa play for a 10th time will be more or less compelling than a Monday night game between Toronto and Boston.
Of course, it's better than the alternative. And you have only have to see what's going on with the World Junior Hockey Championship to get a feel for how dangerously close the NHL is to scrapping the entire season.
As of Tuesday, five players on Team Canada were deemed “unfit to play,” while Team Sweden announced that its coach and three others had tested positive for the coronavirus. Finland's top hockey league is currently in temporary shutdown because of an outbreak of the virus.
It's also worth noting that the NFL, which plays far fewer games and travels far less than the NHL, has been a daily exercise in cancellations and embarrassments, such as Denver having to play without a quarterback and Pittsburgh rescheduling its game against Baltimore three different times.
In other words, the NHL better keep emergency backup goalie David Ayres' number on speed dial.
Getting this season completed — much less started — isn't going to be easy. For fans, it's best to keep your expectations low and your fingers crossed.