As NHL restart nears, what does a doomsday scenario look like? | Sportsnet.ca
Chris Johnston is absolutely right that it’s no fun being the one going “okay, but what if something goes wrong?” Nobody wants to hear that.
The idea of a team getting disqualified because of an outbreak is, well, it’s better than the players on that team infecting their (next) opponents, but it will definitely raise some questions if that does start happening.
Something I don’t plan to waste time on, though, is worrying about a player being held out of a Game 7 because of a false positive on a COVID-19 test. Could it happen? Sure. Look at Nicklas Backstrom missing the gold-medal game at the Sochi Olympics because his allergy meds turned up as a positive on a drug test.
But there’s no way that a team can prevent a goon from cheapshotting their star player right before a Game 7 or other elimination game, or even to prevent one of their own players from getting suspended (automatic suspension for late-game instigation actually getting applied for once in the 2015 Lightning-Red Wings series, anyone? Player used a homophobic slur on camera and the league felt like doing something about it that year?). In the grand scheme of things, it could be much worse.
Oilers’ Green joins list of players opting out of NHL return | ProHockeyTalk | NBC Sports
The NHL is taking over reporting of who’s playing, who’s sick-or-injured, and who’s not reporting. It’s a reasonable move to protect player privacy, but it does raise some questions about how they plan to handle injury reports “to protect player privacy”–are we going to see returns to the upper/lower body injury mode the Predators prefer year-round and a lot of teams slide into during the playoffs, or will it be something closer to the league regular-season standard? Or will we get the rare, elite “body injury” report?
Lightning’s Stamkos injured again at start of training camp | ProHockeyTalk | NBC Sports
I feel like in ten or twenty years’ time we’re going to be looking back and going “gosh, imagine what Steven Stamkos’s career would have been like if he’d actually been healthy. Imagine what he could have done.”
I definitely remember wondering, when Kevin Fiala broke his femur in the 2017 playoffs, whether he was going to have the same never-quite-what-he-was as Stamkos did. And for Stamkos it didn’t stop there; it’s just been one thing after another.
NHL hubs offer little economic benefit, but morale boost is valuable | Sportsnet.ca
It’s been a really rough spring and summer for a lot of people who have had events they were looking forward to canceled, trips to see friends postponed, and daily routines completely upended with no regular entertainment. I would love it to be possible for sports to come back safely, to give people something to enjoy. I really hope they can.
Made in Michigan: Why the Univ. of Michigan deserves to go D-I in the NCAA | The Ice Garden
It’s not Monday, but I’m sneaking in ahead of Bobby with this piece about how it would benefit the NCAA, the University of Michigan, hockey programs in the state of Michigan, and women’s hockey in general if someone would just hurry up and talk some sense into the athletic department at the University of Michigan. They’re making some very sub-optimal choices.
Friendly rivalries and the time I sold my dignity for $5 | The Ice Garden
It’s all about the experience!