Hope for summer hockey, but it’s a long shot at best
Almost five weeks ago, when Ottawa Senators goaltender Craig Anderson first addressed the possibility of playing an NHL game without fans in the stands, he couldn’t possibly have anticipated the grand proposal for summer hockey that has made the rounds this week.
Anderson’s comments came following the Senators’ 2-1 overtime victory over the Sharks at the SAP Center in San Jose on March 7. At the time, Anderson thought a contest without spectators might be a one-off, because Silicon Valley was an early North American hot spot for the novel coronavirus.
“I thought it would be cool,” Anderson said of a game that has since gained significance because the Sharks organization and its fans dismissed recommendations from area health officials to avoid large public gatherings.
“It’s something different. So many times, you get stuck in a routine. So, when the out-ofthe-ordinary happens, it makes it more memorable. Five years from now, when you talk about a game, you’re not going to talk about the game that you won 2-1 in overtime. You’re talking about the game when there were no fans there.”
As it turns out, the lasting memories of that California road trip, which also included stops in Anaheim on March 10 and Los Angeles on March 11, will be something else altogether. Five Senators players, one additional staff member and TSN analyst Gord Wilson have since tested positive for COVID-19. Now fans are hoping the NHL can finish out the 2019-20 season and/or playoffs by playing games well into the summer, without fans in the seats, at neutral site arenas in Saskatoon, Grand Forks, N.D., or in other markets where the virus has been relatively well contained.
While Anderson was talking in early March about a short-term fix in a select area, the notion of a series of games played in isolation — first reported by Sportsnet’s Elliotte Friedman — is out-of-the-arena thinking.
There are a hundred reasons why playing games in isolation would seem to make little sense. The safest and healthiest option would be for the league to simply wash its hands of the current season and begin preparations for a full 82-game return in 2020-21.
There are a series of significant questions on how it would be possible to protect players, team staff, building staff and hotel staff. The cities involved would need to sign off on exempting the NHL from physical distancing rules that apply to the rest of the community, and there would need to be agreements on how local health resources would be utilized to test players.
Yet, if there’s any hope for the NHL to salvage cash from its enormous advertising and TV broadcast deals, the league isn’t going to quietly skate away.
Throughout North America, we’ve yet to hit the peak of COVID -19 deaths. Accordingly, the idea of the NHL returning to action in the summer remains a long shot, and a far cry from what Anderson was envisioning in early March.