NHL can’t pass on COVID-19
One of the favoured tropes of literature and cinema is the man or woman who, through ambition or desire to win favour, engages in contortions so elaborate he or she is in short order barely recognizable.
Take the aspiring journalist played by Anne Hathaway in “The Devil Wears Prada,” who turns herself into a stylish pretzel answering to Meryl Streep’s demands and whims.
She is transformed, but in the end unhappy. She has a new wardrobe and new friends, or at least new acquaintances. Her old ones are appalled.
The National Hockey League runs something of the same risk these days as it dresses itself up for a playoff format it hopes will satisfactorily conclude the coronavirus-interrupted season.
It scraps the regular season, appoints 24 teams to the conference-based playoffs, gives the top four teams in each conference a first-round bye, during which they’ll play a friendly round-robin amongst themselves while the other16 qualifiers cull the herd.
The games are to be played in the dead of summer by athletes who have been away from game-action for two months. They are to be played in empty arenas in two hub cities, one for the east conference and another for the west, that are yet to be chosen.
Rosters are to be expanded and teams will be limited to 50 personnel, with a reduced support staff inside the arena and, of course, comprehensive COVID-19 testing.
Already this sounds like Andrea “Andy” Sachs, the aforementioned step-and-fetch-it to Streep’s Miranda Priestly, all done up in Jimmy Choo and designer ensembles.
Other than technically producing a Stanley Cup champion, and satisfying the cravings of hockey’s most hopelessly addicted fans or the need of the housebound for more avenues of distraction, the process is so jerry-rigged as to boggle the mind.
It is to hockey as we know it as UFC cage matches are to Greco-Roman wrestling. As Dave Caldwell wrote on theguardian.com, “It just feels so … forced.”
Where the winner would be placed in the pantheon of Cup-winning predecessors is impossible to say, given that all the normal touchstones have vanished.
NHL commissioner Gary Bettman said the NHL is “not planning this for economics.” Fans “would like the game back,” he explained. “It represents a sense of normalcy.”
Well, perhaps. One (wo)man’s normalcy is another’s delusion. And there is evidence, given the ratings for the National Football League draft conducted from the commissioner’s rec room, that sports fans are desperate to watch anything smacking of competition.
What should not happen, however, is any government accommodation of the special considerations requested by the NHLand those — including Alberta Premier Jason Kenney — pleading its case.
Bill Daly, the NHL’s deputy commissioner, warned that unless Canada relaxes its requirement for incoming travellers to self-isolate for 14 days, “we won’t be in a position to use any of the Canadian cities as a hub city.”
For his part, the Alberta premier has already written Prime Minister Justin Trudeau asking the federal government to declare the NHLers “essential workers” and exempt players and personnel from travel restrictions.
To tug a forelock to the NHL would send a most distressing message to the health-care professionals who have put the greater good over self.
It would insult the willingness of all those citizens who accepted the limitations on their lives and mobility.
It would put the interests of the already affluent ahead of all those individuals, businesses and government treasuries devastated by the effects of the virus.
And besides simple matters of fairness and justice, surely hockey traditionalists will be offended by this old friend tarted up in stilettos and Prada.
It’s almost enough to make you wonder what Don Cherry would say about it all.