The St. Louis Blues are very interested in the NHL’s plans to resume the rest of 2019-20, since they’d be defending champions. However, decent ideas are being pushed aside for ones that cause more problems.
While the St. Louis Blues have been busy signing their current players to extensions, the league is still trying to come up with ideas that will resume the 2019-20 season. Whether that is the finishing of the regular season or just playoffs remains to be seen.
However, as of right now, it would seem the league is trying to make finishing the regular season, in some form, a priority. The problem is, they are abandoning ideas that might have been better.
As was reported by Elliotte Freidman and ESPN, the league seems to be giving up on the idea of a single, neutral site for all playoff games and possibly a regular season. The explanation about not being enough facilities, i.e. hotels mainly, for players, staff and broadcast members is valid but somewhat weak.
The one that made the most sense was the North Dakota one, or something similar. It is not hugely populated and there should have been enough rinks to accommodate multiple games.
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If the broadcast crew has to be somewhat skeleton, so be it. I have worked on plenty of minimalist crews in the past and while you might not have all the bells and whistles, you get the job done and people see the games.
Now, the NHL is considering a four-site plan. Originally, it was suggested these cities would be based on the divisions in which teams play, but thankfully Gary Bettman debunked that.
Trying to make host sites based on divisions would have been near impossible, unless circumstances change. The Central Division would have any number of places to choose from. The Pacific would probably be limited to Arizona or maybe Vegas.
The Eastern Conference would have been a mess. You have Miami, Tampa or Raleigh to choose from. The rest of the cities are less likely to end their stay-at-home orders because of how hard hit the east coast, New York particularly, has been.
Regardless of where these sites are, there are still a ton of questions that have not remotely been answered. If you go with the separate sites, which seems to be gaining favor to finish the regular season, you have to change the schedule.
If you had a centralized site, you could have played the games as they were on each team’s schedule and just altered the rest periods between. With things in different cities, there is no way you can figure out a way to get all the right teams bunched together to play the right games.
For example, the Blues had games remaining against San Jose, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Florida, Carolina, Washington, Minnesota, Detroit, Boston and Colorado. There is at least one representative from each and every division in that group.
There’s no way to get that entire grouping of teams to one location just to satisfy the Blues schedule. So, games would have to be changed and thus the end of the schedule becomes unbalanced.
The only way to make it somewhat fair would be to find a way to, reasonably, evenly split the bottom teams with the top teams. Otherwise you might get a scenario where teams on the bubble or fighting for positioning have harder or easier schedules than their counterparts.
Say they went with the divisional split, even if they’re not choosing arenas based on divisions. The Blues are now splitting their final games with Colorado (possibly more than the once already scheduled), Dallas, Winnipeg, Nashville and Minnesota, who are all fighting for playoff spots and also Chicago, who would love to play spoiler – technically the Blackhawks are even still in contention.
The Metropolitan would be even worse. Their entire division, except for New Jersey, is in the playoff hunt and yet they’d have to beat up on one another.
Flip that around for teams in the Pacific. The upper half gets to feast on easier games against Anaheim, San Jose and Los Angeles.
In the Atlantic, half the division is .500 or under. That’s just not all that fair to change the rules in the middle of the game, regardless of unprecedented circumstances.
How do you figure out who plays? If you’re scrapping the current schedule for a format in four cities, what happens when one team has 13 games to play and another only 11?
How do you balance things? Maybe you can bite the bullet on easiness of games. For the Blues it would stink to lose that game against Detroit where you could have potentially played younger guys, but it is what it is.
These things are probably already being discussed or ironed out. While fans are not required to know all details, it just seems like such a proposal should not be presented by the commissioner without some ideas behind it.
Simply saying you are looking at having four, separate sites just raises more questions. And don’t even get me started on possibly moving the draft back to June, as originally scheduled.
That causes even more problems. You can’t trade players, which often happens at the draft, because that would be extremely awkawrd to have a guy on your playoff roster that knows he’s with a different team the following year.
How do you figure out the details on conditional picks if you don’t know the playoff situation? How do you organize the lottery if you have not even finalized a playoff plan?
Bettman said plans would be put in place to assure there being no way a Stanley Cup champion could draft number one. Unless a trade has been made or a team owns a previous team’s pick, there is no way a Stanley Cup champion should be drafting anywhere in the lottery to begin with.
You can say just ban trades including NHL talent, but that is completely altering a team’s draft game plan. A GM that might have changed two or three picks into a budding NHL player or guy that just needs that change of scenery is suddenly hamstrung and forced to make one pick. Or, a team that only had one pick and has aging players can no longer trade pieces off their roster to bolster their draft for the future.
I get the league wants some form of normalcy and they are trying to not cram everything into a handful of weeks, assuming they can end this season at all. Right now, they seem to be creating more problems than they had.
Hopefully, smarter heads will come up with something. Say what you will about his personality, but Bettman has been good for the league, financially, even if he was at the head for multiple work stoppages.
Hopefully, he has enough people working on this problem to find good answers.