With puck drop only a few hours away, it’s time to prepare for a shortened and special NHL season!
The National Hockey League is set to kick off its 104th season this evening with five games on the schedule. With rivalries such as Flyers vs. Penguins and Montréal vs. Toronto highlighting the schedule, tonight is sure to be the start of an exciting season. In fact, less than a month after the NHL and NHL Players’ Association reached an agreement to play a 56-game regular season, it’s the schedule itself that makes this season the most exciting season to date!
This season contains a new league realignment, which features four realigned divisions. These divisions are listed as the: East, West, Central and North Divisions. According to the NHL, the North division will host all the Canadian teams and each team within this division will play every other team within it a total of nine or 10 times. Teams in the East, West and Central, will reportedly play teams within their specific divisions eight times.
Due to travel restrictions surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic, this means that Canadian teams (North Division) will only play Canadian teams, East teams will only play East teams, and so on. With this type of schedule comes a playoff-like experience throughout its entirety, with some teams playing against one another up to five-times in a row! For hockey fans far and wide, there’s nothing better than getting a mid-season best-of-five series against a division rival.
Hopefully this will be the only season that the NHL must go fanless, as everyone across the world is still learning to coexist with COVID-19.
The NHL has already had to postpone games to begin their season, particularly within the Dallas Stars organization; the Stars produced 17 of the 27 positive tests registered in the NHL’s last round of COVID-19 testing. Fans, players and owners can only hope that this outbreak can be contained and not impact further games from being played, however with the Major Leagues allowing their seasons to resume from the comfort of the host-cities arenas, it seems the bubble-strategies that the NHL, NBA and MLB adopted last season(s) have gone by the wayside.
This will surely create some problems for the League(s) to adapt to as they begin their new seasons, however NHLPA Executive Director Don Fehr is quoted as saying,
“The players are pleased to have finalized agreements for the upcoming season, which will be unique but also very exciting for the fans and players alike. During these troubled times, we hope that NHL games will provide fans with some much needed entertainment as the players return to the ice.”
No matter what team you support, I wish hockey fans well as we embark on this new and exciting season! The opportunity to cheer for our favourite teams is right around the corner, so get ready and enjoy a season like no other from the NHL.
Andrew