NHL FOCUSING ON MID-JANUARY FOR ITS RETURN

Time has all but run out on the NHL’s hope to start the season Jan. 1, with the league and NHL Players’ Association now focusing their discussions on opening play in mid-January, a person familiar with the talks told The Associated Press on Friday.

A mid-January start date has become more realistic given the number of issues that need to be resolved before players can begin traveling to their home cities, according to the person who spoke to The AP on the condition of anonymity because the discussions are private.

The two sides still need to agree on a schedule, with the current working plan featuring between 52 and 56 regular-season games. There has also been talk of a buffer being worked into the schedule in the event games are postponed due to the coronavirus pandemic, the person said.

Also needing to be resolved is a onetime divisional realignment, with the likelihood of there being a seven-team allCanada division due to cross-border travel restrictions, as well as an updated COVID-19 protocol for players and teams.

Under a mid-January start date, players would have to begin reporting after Christmas, followed by a shortened training camp and preseason. The regular season likely would stretch into early May at the latest, with the Stanley Cup Final targeted to end in late June or early July.

Soccer

The United States will start a revised and compacted men’s World Cup qualifying schedule with a match in early September that could be at Trinidad and Tobago, which beat the Americans in October 2017 to eliminate them from the 2018 tournament in Russia.

Qualifying was to have began for the Americans this past September but was delayed due to the coronavirus pandemic. Under the revised schedule, the U.S. will play three matches each in the September and October 2021 international fixture windows and three apiece in January and March 2022. The Americans will play two in November 2021.

• French great Patrick Vieira was fired as coach of Nice after his team was eliminated from the Europa League.

Motorsports

Jimmie Johnson will open his first year of semi-retirement by racing the Rolex 24 at Daytona in January as part of an Action Express Racing lineup revealed Friday that should be among the best in the field.

The seven-time NASCAR champion will be paired with Simon Pagenaud, Kamui Kobayashi and Mike Rockenfeller in the marquee IMSA sports car event considered the unofficial opener of the racing season.

Also

The New York Liberty will pick No. 1 for the second consecutive year in the WNBA draft. This time there isn’t really a clear-cut choice of who they’ll take to pair with last year’s choice of Sabrina Ionescu. Dallas will pick second, with Atlanta third and Indiana fourth.

• The cost of the postponement for the Tokyo Olympics could reach about $2.8 billion, according to figures released by the Tokyo organizing committee, the Tokyo city government and Japan’s national government.

• Ukrainian tennis player Stanislav Poplavskyy has been given a lifetime ban for participating in match-fixing activities, the Tennis Integrity Unit said. The TIU said Poplavskyy took part in matchfixing and “courtsiding ” activities on multiple occasions between 2015 and 2019.

• Mar v Marinovich, who captained USC’s national championship football team in 1962 and famously employed his strength and conditioning methods to groom son Todd into becoming quarterback for the Trojans, died. He was 81. The university said he died Thursday of natural causes in Mission Viejo.