Daily Local News (West Chester, PA)
Time for NHL, NBA to be serious about seasons
Time for NHL, NBA to be serious about seasons
I don’t know about you, but I’m thinking a re-start is in order here. To that end, I’m painting the upstairs for the first time since buying the house nearly 18 years ago.
It’s painfully obvious that our daily agendas don’t exactly seem fulfilling in the Age of a Quarantine. Yet everyone knows they’re lucky just to be able to carry on.
Perhaps in that vein, most major professional sports leagues, and many amateur athletic bodies on other levels, seem to be unable to give up the ghost. Shut down for the better part of March, some are still trumpeting (pun intended) a return before their time. If not by the beautiful Easter holiday, then maybe not long after. There are exceptions, of course. Around the globe, World Cup events in sports from climbing to cricket were either canceled or postponed to an indefinite time.
Pushed back a year are the Olympics. Took them long enough, but the IOC and Japan finally mutually agreed to a smart solution for the Summer Games. Did so with fingers crossed that COVID-19 doesn’t come back in subsequent waves, of course.
The present is bad enough without looking ahead, though.
NASTYCAR events from the past two weekends were canceled in Miami and Atlanta. Iconic spring traditions like the Masters and Kentucky Derby are postponed. Springtime traditions in Philadelphia, like the Penn Relays and the Stotesbury Cup Regatta, are also banged.
The Champions League leads a parade of soccer events world-wide that won’t be played, or at least not anytime soon. And, of course, the NBA, the NHL, Major League Soccer and finally Major League Baseball all were shut down indefinitely.
Only the NFL is allowed to all-but ignore the ongoing pandemic effects in sports right now, with the only concession thus far being the NFL Draft won’t be a fabulous Las Vegas spectacle, and instead will be something else of undetermined boredom.
No prospects have been brought in for reivew, but carry on it will, over the same threeday term (April 23-25), all televised in sleep-inducing detail by ESPN.
Reportedly, there are no concrete plans on how the draft will be conducted, since various state lockdown orders and social distancing recommendations will come into play for the teams and their respective war rooms. What’s more, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell apparently ordered league employees to refrain from criticizing or even questioning the plans (or lack thereof), issuing a league memo that warned, “public discussion of issues relating to the draft serves no useful purpose and is grounds for disciplinary action.” Thanks Commish. The NFL can still feel fine about its coming season, though, figuring all this virus stuff may pass by the summer. That might be an empty hope but time will tell.
As for the other leagues, they get no such luxury. The NHL shut its doors with but a few weeks left in the regular season. The Flyers had burst to within a point of the Washington Capitals for the Metropolitan Division lead with 13 games left to go. They even seemed to have title hopes, though the Boston Bruins, who ended a nine-game Flyers win streak just prior to closing day, were (are?) far and away the best team in the league.
All the Bruins, Caps and Flyers, along with hot West teams Colorado, Vegas and defending champion St. Louis, can do is sit around and wait with the rest of the world, wondering when they can all get back to work.
Instead, how about a league decision for a re-start? Starting with a playoff tournament to be conducted whenever it is deemed safe to return? The way things look now, that would be sometime around mid-late May at the earliest.
The NBA should lay down similar groundwork, though the league is essentially open to any wild scenario going forward. While the hockey guys are looking at a truncated season, with both Sidney Crosby and Alex Ovechkin saying in interviews Thursday that hopping right into a playoff scenario could at least be workable, if not ideal, the NBA is planning for anything and everything.
Play the season and the playoffs out, then delay the start of 2020-21?
Completing the season with games during the summer months?
Jumping right into the playoffs, as the NHL might ponder?
Shortening the length of the playoff tournament altogether? All possibilities. Not so much for Baseball. Blessed that the shutdowns came before the first regular season pitch was thrown, MLB and its players union went the negotiating route on what would have been opening day on Thursday and agreed to have as close to a full season as possible, weather be damned.
That could easily mean a World Series in a neutral dome site the week before Christmas, but hey, so be it. Their re-start could be an altogether wrong start.
Alas, neither the owners nor the players were interested in anything that might not guarantee them as close to their usual financial windfalls as possible. Play all the games whenever possible, for as many days in a row and sometimes doing two-adays ... as long as they’re played.
Baseball fever, catch it. No matter how sick people might be of strange schedules by World Series time. After all, the NHL and NBA might still be playing their 2019-20 seasons by then.
Contact Rob Parent at rparent@21st-centurymedia. com; you can follow him on Twitter @ReluctantSE.