Lots Of Chatter About NHL Playoff Re-Start And Format Being Approved Soon
Big time news drop late this evening. Looks like we have hockey coming back and it could be announced very soon
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That was earlier from the good hockey reporting folks up in Canada. I talked to a guy who works for an Eastern Conference team, another from a Pacific division team, and then an NHLPA member on a Central team. They're all sort of saying the same thing. The NHL won't rush this. Nothing is official, but four hubs cities with 6 teams a piece has been shot down.
Two hub cities, one of them being Vegas, will host 12 teams and they'll give the top 4 teams a bye week. Then 5vs12, 6vs11, etc. Opening round will be a best of 5 and then the league will press start on a traditional looking 16 team playoff.
This format is both awesome and shitty at the same time. I think we are going to get games every single day, at every hour of the day, all summer long. Great for entertainment, bad for my bank account because gambling on this thing will be impossible. There's no way to know how serious the players will take this. I doubt it has the feel and intensity of a real post-season. The Oilers had a great season and their prize for that is a short series against Toews, Kane, Keith, and Crawford. Imagine you're Connor McDavid and you've been playing video games all break against Grinelli and then all of sudden the season starts and you have this dude lining up against you
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Not great. Overall though, I am just glad to have a path towards hockey, a normalized country, and a recovering economy. I can't wait to have a Blackhawks watch party at Declans that starts at 12pm on a Thursday. That'll be incredible.
Nobody really had a timeline for this start, but my guess would be mid-July. I was told that the players are asking for a three week training camp. So let's say this thing gets approved this week. The league still needs to secure sites, testing, clearance, TV deals, and literally everything else that goes into staging a massive two month long hockey tournament. My guess is that training camps open in July, and the games start like 7/18. Pure guess, but every day it looks more and more like life and hockey are coming back to North America.