The Blackhawks’ three-year playoff drought is over.
With an asterisk.
The NHL announced its 2019-20 season resumption plan in a televised special Tuesday, pulling the plug on the regular season but making official the 24-team playoff format that has been rumored over the past week.
The Hawks, the 12th and last seed in the Western Conference, will play a best-of-five series against the fifth-seeded Oilers in a to-be-announced Western hub city.
The top four teams in each conference will play a round-robin tournament to determine their seeds. The series involving the fifth- through 12th-place teams will be technically a “qualifying round” for the playoffs and will be played with regular-season-style overtime and shootout rules, but also won’t be considered regular season games and won’t have statistics counted in the regular season.
“The reason we are doing this is because our fans are telling us, in overwhelming numbers, that they want us to finish the season if at all possible,” league commissioner Gary Bettman said on NBC Sports Network. “And our players and our teams are clear that they want to play and bring the season to its rightful conclusion.”
The Blues, Avalanche, Knights and Stars are the four Western teams automatically advancing past the qualifying round. The other Western qualifying series are Predators-Coyotes, Canucks-Wild and Flames-Jets.
The Hawks will likely be happy about drawing the Oilers, despite their inferior seed and record.
The Hawks won two of three regular-season meeting against Edmonton, out-shooting them all three times, and have a drastic advantage in postseason experience up and down their roster. But the Oilers do have the top two scorers in the league this season in Leon Draisaitl and Connor McDavid.
Additionally, Chicago was listed among 10 cities in the pool from which the NHL will choose its two hub cities, likely within a few weeks. The others are Columbus, Las Vegas, Dallas, Edmonton, Toronto, Vancouver, Minneapolis-St. Paul and Pittsburgh.
Columbus and Las Vegas are considered early favorites because of their relatively low COVID-19 numbers, arena location, governmental cooperation and hotel availability.
Teams will be instructed to bring only 50 essential personnel with them to the hub city, Bettman said.
Meanwhile, if the Hawks lose their series against the Oilers, they’ll inherit a low-odds spot in a convoluted draft lottery format also announced Tuesday.
Bettman didn’t give specific dates for the return to play timetable, but said the league hopes to resume training camps in early July and to award the Stanley Cup in early fall.
The league had already announced Monday that players could practice in small groups of up to six people starting in early June.
“As we seek a return to normalcy, this is an important day,” Bettman said.
Nonetheless, the ongoing coronavirus pandemic — which paused the NHL season back on March 12 — still determines the ultimate fate of the resumption plan.
