It’s time for the NHL to admit the season is over
Kings blue-liner Doughty agrees scenarios for resuming play are now pipe dreams
Cancel the season. Just end it already.
Gary Bettman can talk all he wants about playing games in neutral sites without fans, cutting down the playoffs to best-of-five series and awarding the Stanley Cup sometime in September, but he’s not fooling anyone. They are pipe dreams — all of them.
The season is done and Drew Doughty knows it.
“I don’t see how the season is going to return. I really don’t,” the Los Angeles Kings defenceman said in a candid conference call on Monday. “We just don’t know when the virus is going to pass. And we’re all sitting at home. We’re just sitting here working out and waiting to return at any point. I would hope that the NHL would make a decision soon. It would seem it’s going to be tough to resume the season or play the playoffs. The fans want us to resume and we want to play for them. But it seems like it’s going to be really tough to do that, though.”
Good on Doughty for saying what Bettman probably already knows is true.
There won’t be any more hockey this year. No playoffs. No Stanley Cup. Not with the coronavirus continuing to claim more and more lives every day.
And yet, as days and weeks pass, the NHL commissioner still isn’t ready to pull the plug just yet.
“When we’ll have the opportunity to return depends on things that we have absolutely no control over,” Bettman told CNN on Monday. “We don’t know when we can come back. But it’s something we’re monitoring on a daily basis.”
Selfishly, we all can’t wait for the NHL to return, if only because we want to get back to normalcy. A world without sports is a world we really don’t want to live in. At the same time, do we really want to crown a Stanley Cup champion in this environment?
It’s been a full month since the NHL shut its doors and paused the season. It will likely be another two months or more before it’s safe to open them again.
During this time, players haven’t had access to ice. Most are training. But a lack of equipment has some simply performing pushups or bench-pressing their pets.
The league was forced to declare a Cup winner during the 48-game lockout-shortened season in 2012-13. Of course, it was the first three months — not the final three — that the players missed that year. The playoffs still looked like the playoffs.
That won’t be the case this time around.
There has been talk of playing all the games in a neutral site such as North Dakota or somewhere in Saskatoon, but without fans. There has been talk of a truncated playoff schedule in order to finish things off in time for the start of the 2020-21 season.
One idea is to expand the number of playoff teams from 16 to 24, since determining the seeding could be problematic when not every team has played the same number of games and so many teams are theoretically still in the hunt. Do that, however, and you might have to cut each series down from a best of seven to a best of five, or even a best of three, to fit it all in.
Do that and you’ll need to put an asterisk next to the winner’s name.
“I know they badly want to give out the Stanley Cup this year,” said Doughty.
“But in all seriousness, it’s not going to be like winning a real Stanley Cup.”
It’s worth mentioning that Doughty is a self-proclaimed chirper who was voted the second-best trash talker in a recent NHLPA poll. He revels in stirring the pot. He loves courting controversy.
He’s also speaking from the standpoint of someone who is on the fourth-worst team in the entire league this season. If the playoffs do occur, it will be without him and the Kings.
But it’s not the playoff format that has Doughty worried. Rather, it’s the shape the players will be in once the post-season begins. And what shape they’ll be in for the following year if one season ends and another begins without much of a break.
In this regard, Doughty speaks from experience.
The last time the NHL played meaningful games in September was during the 2016 World Cup of Hockey, with the two-week tournament occurring at the same time as training camps.
Once it was done, the regular season began.
“I never recovered from that World Cup,” said Doughty, who won the tournament as a member of Team Canada. “I was sore the entire two weeks. I was in absolute pain the rest of the season.”