ALL OPTIONS ON TABLE FOR RETURN, BUT NHL SAYS SAFETY COMES FIRST
Deputy commissioner Daly won’t rule out playing in summer or in empty arenas
The NHL won’t return to action until it’s safe to come back.
Deputy commissioner Bill Daly told Postmedia in a telephone interview on Tuesday that, while he remains hopeful the NHL will be able to resume play to finish the season and hold the Stanley Cup playoffs, it’s not going to happen before the league gets the green light from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control.
And, while all options for trying to finish this year are on the table, the league doesn’t want to do anything that’s going to negatively effect the start of next season.
Right now, the league can’t tell anybody what the future holds because NHL commissioner Gary Bettman and Daly don’t have a crystal ball.
It doesn’t sound like the league will be back now before midmay — if this season resumes at all — and nobody is sure if that will give the NHL enough time to finish the season plus hold the playoffs. At this point, like everybody else, they remain hopeful.
“It all depends on how we decide to come back and what form that would take,” Daly said from the league’s headquarters in New York, where he’s one of only a handful of employees in the office. “I don’t think there’s any hard outs in mid-june or the end of June. It has a lot to do with what else transpires, and there are a lot of variables involved.
“What are your networks capable of doing? What do buildings have in terms of availability during the relevant time period?
“There’s a lot to consider, but I don’t think there’s an artificial deadline, per se. The only deadline would be whatever we decide to do to complete this season, if anything. We don’t want it to interfere with our ability to have a full season next year.”
Would you be willing to play in July? According to Daly, every possible scenario is being considered.
“I’ve been asked today if August is a possibility,” Daly said. “I’m not sure it’s a preference, and there may be a number of things that would make it an impossibility, but I wouldn’t rule out August as a possibility.”
The decision was made to shut down the NHL last Thursday, not long after the NBA decided to close up shop. The league had been receiving regular updates from the CDC for the last two weeks, but Daly noted the NHL moved quickly. No players had tested positive when the decision was made and the league wanted to do its part to help flatten the curve.
The reality is, the possibility of a pause in the schedule appeared on the radar screen a week before the decision was made, when Santa Clara health officials suggested the San Jose Sharks play in front of an empty arena. The Sharks played three more games after that, but the shutdown was called a few days after that as concerns about the virus heightened across North America.
“Everything was so compressed in terms of how the situation was evolving,” Daly said. “While I would say in real terms, it was a very short period of time, maybe a couple of days, in terms of how it was evolving, it seemed like a lifetime. Santa Clara issued its recommendation the Thursday ( before), and during that time period, we were giving consideration to all possible alternatives.
“A lot of that was going to depend on what was happening elsewhere, how quickly the situation was escalating, and ultimately what was safest for our fans and our players. It was, and continues to be, a very fluid situation.”
Added Daly: “Over a two-week period it went from zero to 60, and Gary likes to say it because it’s true, we were dealing with it on a day-to-day basis originally. In the last five to six days before we had to hit pause, I would say it was an hour-to-hour type of thing.”
Daly noted the NHL was in regular contact with officials from the NBA, Major League Baseball and the MLS before the decision was made to put the league on hold.
“All of the sports leagues tried to be as co-ordinated as we could be in terms of sharing information, best practices, advice we were giving our clubs, even strategic direction, to a certain extent,” Daly said. “We were all running as fast as we could to kind of avoid the storm, with the realization that if one of our players tested positive, it would be a game-changer as to how you would have to respond to it.
“While it wasn’t our player who tested positive, once the NBA player tested positive, I think we felt like it was time to become more proactive. This storm was going to overtake us and it was just a matter of time, so we might as well hit the pause button, assess the health of the NHL community and our players, and assess what was best from a health standpoint for our fans. That’s why the decision was made.”
Yes, the league studied the option of playing in front of empty rinks, but realized it was just going to be a matter of time before one of their players contracted the disease.
“A player testing positive would have had a number of related consequences, including, theoretically, it would put a whole lot of people into self-quarantine and theoretically disable a number of teams from even being able to compete,” Daly said. “That was a reality that all the leagues were facing.
“While we still haven’t had a player who has tested positive, knock on wood, the bottom line is playing in empty buildings for a week until a player tested positive, I’m not really sure that solves the problem all that much. Let’s see if there’s a more fundamental way to address the issue, rather than trying to put your fingers in the dike along the way.”
The league’s decision to allow players to all head home on Monday — even those living in Europe — caught some people off guard, but it doesn’t mean the league is throwing in the towel on the season. The hope is that many will remain in their NHL cities because the expectation is that, at some point in the next month, the league may be able to open training facilities again.
“When we paused last Thursday, we certainly did it with the hope that we’d be able to finish our season,” said Daly. “When we paused originally, we hoped that we’d be able to resume a little more quickly, maybe within a month’s time period on the outside. The CDC’S new policy on Sunday night made it clear that time period was clearly going to be extended, and that we were going to be waiting for a while.
“Hopefully most of our players stayed in their club cities, because that’s where the best resources for them to be situated are. But, for players who are in uncomfortable situations away from their families and away from their homes, we didn’t think it was prudent to keep them around in situations where they weren’t comfortable, particularly when we’re telling them to self quarantine for a period of time.
“We just felt it was most prudent to let them go where they needed to go.”
The NHL won’t come back until the CDC determines that the spread of the disease is under control.
“Before any sports league is in a position to play again under any circumstances, there’s going to have to be evidence that we’ve stemmed the tide on the spread of this and it’s become less dangerous in that regard,” Daly said. “The experts will tell you that, at some point, you’ll hit the top of that curve and it will start going in the other direction, I think they just differ on when that might be.”
That’s the problem. There’s no exact science to allow the league to pinpoint a date, and yes, the league would consider playing in empty rinks for television if it was safe for everyone involved.
“We’re not ruling anything out. That’s obviously not our preference, but I’m also realistic enough to know that, if that was our only alternative, my guess is our fans would want us to conclude the season that way, if they had the ability to consume it on television as opposed to not at all.”
The issue for the league is that people want them to reveal what format they’ll use when they do come back, but that’s impossible to predict because nobody is sure the route this virus is going to take.
“Everybody is asking for what our plan is five days after we paused, and one day after we’ve come to the realization it’s not going to be a short pause,” Daly said. “While a lot of people are working hard and thinking hard on what the possible solutions could be, this isn’t anything we really would be responsible in deciding or trying to decide at this point in time. There are just too many variables.”
Like many of us, Daly may be invested in the game because he works in the NHL, but he’s also a sports fan and he wants to see everybody return to rinks, stadiums and ball parks as much as anybody. However, that’s just too risky at the moment.
“This whole experience shows just how valuable sports is, but this is bigger and transcends the sports world,” said Daly. “It’s about people’s health and well-being, and that should be the priority when determining that sports can come back and serve the good purposes it serves, which is creating entertainment and a diversion for people’s dayto-day existences. We’re going to be thrilled to fill that void again.
“It’s going to happen. The question is just when, and at what point in time? We all have to keep our priorities straight and make sure we’re doing the right things so we’re not unnecessarily endangering anybody.”