NHL set to drop puck on most unusual season
Had the Arizona Coyotes won the Stanley Cup last summer, the asterisk would have been applied faster than a Connor Mcjesus breakaway.
The same goes for any of the borderline playoff teams, and especially those that were gifted entry into the quasi-round that commenced NHL proceedings after the long pandemic-induced layoff: Chicago, the New York teams, Minnesota. Because narrative storylines are often developed only after a sports event has finished, there would have been no end of tales of how the NHL'S wacky bubbles had produced an unlikely champion. Only a battle-tested team like the Blackhawks could survive the two-month crucible of Edmonton in summertime!
Instead, the Tampa Bay Lightning won, and that was pretty much that. Tampa had been a popular Stanley Cup pick for two seasons running, with an AllWorld centreman, defenceman and goaltender anchoring a deep roster. When they hoisted the Cup in Alberta after defeating the Dallas Stars — a perfectly acceptable Western Conference champion — it felt as though the NHL season, bizarre as it had been from March onward, resolved in a normal way. It was a finish that won't look totally out of place two decades from now, even if the point totals might be a little off.
But that normalcy ends now. Welcome to 2021, the Year of the Asterisk.
It remains, of course, entirely possible that the NHL season that begins on Wednesday will spit out a predictable winner upon its conclusion: Colorado, or Vegas, or even Tampa again.
But regardless of who ends up with the Stanley Cup at the end, what happens between now and then will be utterly unlike any kind of NHL season that preceded it. A league that embraces the modern philosophy of parity and balance — use artificial levels to spread out the talent and squish every team toward the middle, the better to ensure that every franchise will at least be competitive every now and then, even if they stumble into competence — has now had to throw all of that out the window in hopes of engineering a schedule that can be completed amid the coronavirus pandemic.
Divisions have been realigned dramatically, the playoff format has been altered alongside it, the schedule length has been trimmed by 30 per cent, and new roster rules have been implemented.
Training camp happened in a flash, and without any exhibition games. And all of those changes exist outside of whatever compromises COVID-19 might force once the games that count actually begin, as has already happened when an outbreak forced the Stars to postpone the start of their season so the team can isolate.
Other sports that have played outside bubbles have remade schedules on the fly and required teams to end up playing with little or no rest, or no practice time, or with squads supplemented by random fellows off the street. It's reasonable to expect the
NHL will have to do at least a little of that scrambling, and it's impossible to know at this point whether some teams will be far more affected by COVID than others. Usually, even in a short season like 2013, where almost half the schedule was swallowed up by a labour dispute, the league still ends up with something approaching a level playing field.
But this won't so much feel like a close approximation of an NHL season as it will feel like a fever dream of an NHL campaign, or an art-house remake of a hockey schedule, or the kind of thing that you and your buddies might dream up while sitting at a bar, back when people could do those things. Wait, what if the Canadian teams played ONLY Canadian teams? And four of them HAD to make the playoffs? HOW COOL
WOULD THAT BE?
And while the NHL season is a much bigger deal in this country than it is in the United States, it will be the Canadian division — sorry, the North — that is most out of whack with what fans in those cities are used to seeing. Toronto-calgary or Vancouver- Ottawa matchups go from being a one-off to a regular occurrence. Meanwhile, a team like the Winnipeg Jets could end up in a playoff series against, say, Montreal, which could only have happened before in the Cup finals (and in the nightmares of several NHL executives). It's all so very strange.
The Canadian experience would become even more odd should one or two of the entrants in the already small seven-team division struggle. Ottawa is expected to be a playoff long shot, but if a terrible start befalls one of the other teams, suddenly it's four teams fighting for five playoff spots. Good odds, that. There are also guaranteed to be two Canadian teams among the league's final eight, so before a puck is even dropped on the 2021 season the math is unusually favourable toward the prospects of a team based in this country finally breaking the 27-year streak of U.S. teams hosting Stanley Cup parades.
In which case, few around these parts will be talking much about an asterisk.