Is the NHL being responsible if they force players to finish the season?

It’s not a secret that the NHL wants to finish the 2019-20 season. However, they might be irresponsible in asking their players to do so.

Before you don’t read past the headline and flood my mentions accusing me of being paranoid, I’m going to have to ask for you to hear me out and think about the situation the NHL, its players, and its fans are in. I love hockey more than I can claim and I want live hockey back more than anyone can possibly fathom. But there has to be a line drawn between what we want and what is rational.

The NHL continues to have discussions about what to do to continue not only this season but next season by coming up with various ways (because I am not calling them solutions) to not have any cancellations, further adding to an already drama-filled 2019-20 season.

If there is anything this season will be remembered, before the league’s pause, it is going to be plethora of off-ice stories. The novel coronavirus pandemic is just the cherry on top.

More from Puck Prose

Former enforcer and 2015 All-Star MVP John Scott released a tweet on April 24th claiming he just got word that NHL camps will begin on June 1 and European players are coming back soon.

This caused a stir in the online hockey community and opened the door for more hope. However, it is not clear whether Scott was being facetious or if he should be believed at face value, especially when flights from Europe are all but cancelled. It is very hard to picture a scenario where air travel is only open for professional athletes and not end in chaos.

And herein lies the rub – “Have we earned the reality of hockey coming back in June?” While the world continues to find solutions to the novel coronavirus crisis, and there have been breakthroughs in the forms of new information about the virus and the curve starting to flatten, we have to acknowledge that we are still not out of the woods and there is still no cure for such a deadly disease.

While betting odds in Vegas to return to NHL Play are -200 before August 1st and +150 August 1st and later, the real odds that should be debating about are the odds of a second wave.

Let’s up the ante. What happens if the NHL decides in June to resume and one player, or one coach, or one staff member, tests positive for the novel coronavirus? Will the NHL pull the plug? This part of the debate is not being discussed as it should and you don’t have to be “paranoid” to postulate worst-case scenarios.

If we’re supposed to be “flattening the curve” with social distancing and quarantining, and we somehow hit the “peak” and then come down from said peak, what follows? Does the league open things up again the same as before? Would that create an opening of a second wave? What happens if we go back to the status quo next season (or even this season, depending on how eager the owners are) and a second wave happens, what then?

Fans and league officials are so focused on the present that all possible outcomes aren’t being explored to their fullest potential. For example, when the state of Georgia re-opened this past week, they got hit with thousands of cases in mere days.

What has been made clear is that owners do not want games to be played in empty arenas next season. A huge portion of the NHL’s profit is from ticket sales, but what they have not made clear as of yet is are they not willing to play unless there’s a vaccine or do they just roll the dice and worry about consequences later.

Darren Rovell had forwarded a tweet of a proposed seating chart with isolated seating, which strangely bear a resemblance to Florida Panthers games. The logistics of said seating strategy will be too complicated. With the traffic coming in and out of the arenas, the patrons will not be adhering to social distancing protocols.

Sure, they can institute these policies, but don’t be surprised if you only get a certain level of compliance. Also, if there are going to be less attendance at games, will the tickets be less expensive or more expensive as there won’t be as many tickets sold?

Now we get to what seems to be lost in all of this – the players. Would the players even want to be away from their families for over a month, sequestered in a hotel? Where is the NHLPA in this? Teams would have to be super meticulous. And even then, the NHL would be running a gigantic risk especially if you have thousands of employees take over a city or rural area for months.

Speaking of which, say the NHL decides to have all their teams go to one location and say that they have low numbers in terms of people tested for the novel coronavirus, is the NHL willing the risk of a potential lawsuit if there is a spike of people testing positive for it?

No one is saying to not be positive or negative about the NHL picking up where they left off, but it is very difficult to be optimistic once you dissect the quagmire the NHL, and all sports, are in. To have this work and not end in a disaster is a fantasy when it is all said and done. The NHL can’t have a trivia show with P.K. Subban telling viewers to stay indoors and stay safe and carry this out.

There is a great divide about how serious the situation is but it seems at face-value that the people who don’t really care have more of the power. If the NHL wants to be the first league to jump into the alligator pit and risk it all that is their prerogative.

The NHL is the smallest of the big-four leagues in North America so it does not come as a huge surprise that they are the most eager but a number of Ottawa Senators players tested positive just for being in the same dressing room as Rudy Gobert and the Utah Jazz.

Next. Every NHL Team's Greatest Player Of All-Time. dark

All it takes is one case whether it be from a player, coach, media member, hotel staff, and arena staff for the NHL to find themselves in a bigger mess than they originally thought. You have to walk before you run.

Home/Editorials