Chicago’s 124-day hockey drought will finally end next week.
The Blackhawks are set to begin training camp on Monday, July 13, after the NHL and NHL Players Association reached a tentative agreement on a Return to Play plan and Collective Bargaining Agreement extension on Monday.
Although partial-team practices during Phase 2 of the NHL’s RTP plan have been taking place at Fifth Third Arena for weeks — and, in fact, captain Jonathan Toews was the latest player to join the workouts Monday — Monday’s announcement paves the way for the official return of hockey.
After about two weeks of training camp, the Hawks will travel to their hub city — likely Edmonton, unless the NHL unexpectedly sends the Western Conference to Toronto — on July 26.
The league’s qualifying-round matchups, including the 12th-seeded Hawks’ best-of-five series against the fifth-seeded Oilers, will then start August 1.
The dates still must be ratified by the NHL’s Board of Governors and the NHLPA’s entire membership, but the votes are expected to pass easily. A passing vote will also extend the current CBA through 2026, representing a rare and encouraging sign of labor peace for a league historically plagued by lockouts.
Not since the Hawks’ 6-2 win over the Sharks on March 11, the night when the scope of the coronavirus pandemic quickly became visible to the sports world, has an official Hawks event taken place.
A March 12 scheduled practice was cancelled hours before the NHL paused its season, and the Phase 2 practices over recent weeks have been limited to six-to-12 players with no coach contact.
But when Phase 3 goes into effect Monday, “coaches, general managers and hockey operations personnel will be permitted to have direct in-person interactions with players and conduct activities in a typical preseason training camp fashion,” per the league’s guidelines.
Not all will be normal, though.
The Hawks will be limited to 30 skaters (but unlimited goaltenders) at camp, and all participating players must be playoffs-eligible. That means rookie-to-be Ian Mitchell, who signed his entry-level contract in April but reportedly won’t be allowed to play in this year’s restart, can’t practice.
Players be able to opt out of the restart altogether, too. They’ll have to notify the league within three days of the official CBA vote passing.
And COVID-19 testing will become a regular part of the practice schedule. Hawks players not yet participating at Fifth Third Arena will be tested 48 hours before joining practices, and every player and person in contact with players will be tested every other day moving forward.
Media access to players will be limited to Zoom interviews, although reporters will be allowed in the building.
Those rules are just the most noteworthy of hundreds that will be instituted, and that’s not even looking ahead to the hub city portion of the restart. The NHL’s announced protocols for Phase 3 (training camp) and Phase 4 (playoffs) are incredibly in-depth, filling every centimeter of two separate 20-page and 28-page documents.
