With empty buildings and 56 games, what a short, strange trip this NHL season will be
As much as the impending return of the NHL is wrapped in a comforting blanket of normalcy, this is going to be a very weird winter and spring. Weird enough to make last summer’s Toronto and Edmonton bubbles seem like normal relics of the past. Weird enough to make shortened post-lockout seasons -- and the NHL has had a few of those -- feel unabridged.
Getting together at a couple sequestered spots to wrap up a suspended season was one thing. There was a novelty about it that helped it all fit together. Starting from scratch, from soup to Stanley Cup, and playing in the NHL’s normal rinks, is only going to highlight how strange playing professional sports in a pandemic really is.
We’re getting used to it, though. Baseball and the NFL have played in their stadiums and traveled from town to town and been able to move things along. They have shown the path forward for the NHL and NBA, not always a smooth one, but still.
The Carolina Hurricanes at least have the advantage, with a hiccup of a training camp and no preseason games, of returning essentially the same team that lost to the Boston Bruins last August. Enter Jesper Fast. Exit Justin Williams, Joel Edmundson and Trevor van Riemsdyk. The bad taste lingers.
“What’s great about having kind of that same group back is they suffered here and they want better things, and I think that’s what you’re going to see out of those guys,” Hurricanes coach Rod Brind’Amour said Monday.
There were no guarantees this would happen. Labor strife is never far from the surface in the NHL, and while it may seem unthinkable for this season not to happen, it would have been unthinkable at one point for the NHL not to participate in the Olympics, and that happened.
“Everyone just wants to play,” Hurricanes captain Jordan Staal said. “I’m happy we’ve got a pending deal. There’s going to be some sacrifices. Everyone’s made sacrifices at this time. These are small sacrifices, for us to play a game.”
A 56-game NHL schedule in empty buildings
So many of the basic assumptions of an NHL season are already out the window. In the sport with the tightest salary cap, the league and union have already carved out all kinds of accommodations, including a so-called taxi squad of reserve players ready to step in as needed. That seems like a common-sense plan from the outside; from inside the salary cap, it’s a fiendishly complicated accounting scenario. There are countless other wrinkles like that. A hard cap system relies on certain bedrock assumptions to make the numbers work. It is not built for the exceptional.
As the 56-game schedule is finalized, with games only against division opponents and the Hurricanes in the mash-up Central Division, reunited with old foes from the dormant Southeast Division and thrown together with new friends from elsewhere, expect to see baseball-style series, where a team comes into town for a pair of games instead of just one. The close quarters and forced familiarity are fully expected to breed contempt, especially with only one team from the division advancing to the NHL’s final four. A lot of shoulders will bump together as everyone tries to squeeze through the only exit.
And empty buildings: That’s going to require some adjustment, especially at PNC Arena. Up in Winnipeg, Paul Maurice is going to end up telling a lot of stories about Greensboro over the next few months, even by his standards. Truth be told, there was a night or two in the early oughts when it wasn’t much better in Raleigh. (Halloween 2000 vs. Tampa Bay, announced attendance: 7,016.) Those days are long past, of course, and the shuttering of doors for safety reasons comes just as the Hurricanes’ attendance was skyrocketing, up 44 percent over the past three seasons.
It’s going to be short, it’s going to be fast, it may be nasty, but it will be a hockey season.
‘Real’ hockey amid the coronavirus pandemic
The one thing we learned, above all else, in July and August and September was that hockey abides. Even in the most soulless of environments, in empty buildings and neutral sites, it was still playoff hockey between the boards. There were certainly quirks -- teams certainly seemed more willing to pull the chute facing insurmountable deficits than they would if they were headed home to their fans for a Game 6 -- but it was as close to “real” hockey as we were going to get at that point in the pandemic.
Now imagine it playing out across the country, in home rinks, still without fans. It’s a different kind of vibe. Stranger. The bubbles, with all their prepackaged NHL branding, felt like an invitational, a new spin on the NCAA tournament. Now all those empty seats will be in team colors.
It really will feel like a home game, and yet not at all like a home game. It really will feel like a hockey season, and yet not at all like a hockey season. But far better than the alternative.
This story was originally published December 23, 2020 at 6:00 AM with the headline "With empty buildings and 56 games, what a short, strange trip this NHL season will be."
