Next season could be an experiment for league
The reason most hockey players are great golfers is obvious: They’re excellent athletes and have summers off.
Next summer, however, what will be dubbed the 2020- 21 regular season will probably go into July, and the Stanley Cup won’t be awarded until late August or September.
A new tentative Jan. 1 start to the season might stick for ensuing years if next season highlights all the advantages of playing in one calendar year. The NHL has never fared well going head- to- head with fall football, and joining baseball in the summer could be advantageous.
Given that the Stanley Cup has been awarded almost every spring or early summer since 1893 — it’s the oldest trophy to be awarded to a professional sports franchise in North America — traditionalists are bound to provide significant push- back.
But 2021 will serve as a largescale experiment.
“We really haven’t focused precisely on what we’re going to be doing next season,” NHL commissioner Gary Bettman
said on NHL Network last week. “I think it’s fairly clear that while Dec. 1 has always been a notional date, we’re focused on the fact that we’re really looking now at Jan. 1 to start the season up. Our hope is to have a full season, full regular season, and to have fans in the building, but there are a lot of things that have to transpire, many of which, if not most of which, are beyond our control before we can finalize our plans.”
The NHL has too many markets that can’t afford to play without fans. And while the league is happy with its national television contract with NBC ($ 200 million revenue annually), it pales in comparison to Major League Baseball ($ 1.5 billion), the NBA ($ 2.66 billion) and the NFL ($ 6 billion).
So fans in the stands are highly important to the NHL, and the league will plan around that.
If the COVID- 19 crisis continues, next season could be pushed further into next year.
Free- falling agency. The litany of one- and two- year contracts signed since NHL free agency began Friday is a direct result of coronavirus- caused economics. And the fact the top- two free agents — defenseman Alex Pietrangelo and forward Taylor Hall — were still unsigned early Saturday night served as another example of the uncertain financial future.
NHL teams are leery of doling out massive contracts when preparing to possibly take a financial hit next season and beyond. The situation we discussed heavily throughout North American media markets before Friday, and what has unfolded, has certainly underlined the significant concerns by teams.
Pietrangelo and Hall were also still unsigned because the NHL didn’t allow a recruiting period before Friday. In some previous years, the league allowed teams to make their pitches to players in the days leading into free agency, and most of those players would finalize their deals within the first two hours of the event.
Pietrangelo on Saturday confirmed a report that he flew to Las Vegas to visit with the Golden Knights. For all we know, Hall could have been in Denver visiting with the Avalanche — which we believe is interested in signing the 2018 Hart Trophy winner to one of those short- term deals.