New Year’s Day — the targeted start date for the 2021 NHL season — is now only six weeks away.
So why don’t we have any official information yet on what the season will look like?
Financial disagreements between the players’ association and team owners appear to be the primary holdup. But with that said, the league does reportedly have a rough schedule in place, largely ready to go once the other issues are smoothed out.
It may be a 60-game schedule composed entirely of intra-divisional games, Sportsnet’s Elliotte Friedman reported Thursday.
Allowing some leeway to make up postponed games due to inevitable COVID-19 cases, the regular season would last about four months. The playoffs would begin around May 15 and end around July 15 — in time for NBC to switch its coverage to the 2021 Summer Olympics, which begin July 23.
Due to the Canadian border remaining essentially closed, the league would shuffle its divisions to put all seven Canadian teams together, then divide up the 24 U.S. teams into three divisions of eight teams each.
The divisions may end up looking like this, ESPN’s Greg Wyshynski reported Thursday:
Canada: Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto, Winnipeg, Calgary, Edmonton, Vancouver
East: Boston, Buffalo, N.Y. Rangers, N.Y. Islanders, New Jersey, Philadelphia, Washington, Carolina
Central: Florida, Tampa Bay, Nashville, Pittsburgh, Columbus, Detroit, Chicago, St. Louis
West: Minnesota, Colorado, Dallas, Arizona, Vegas, Los Angeles, Anaheim, San Jose
Other versions of the divisional alignment instead put Carolina and/or Minnesota in the Central, with Pittsburgh moving to the East and St. Louis to the West.
Regardless, it seems like the Hawks and Red Wings will be reunited as divisional foes for 2021 — an exciting development for fans who miss the heated rivalry before Detroit’s move to the Eastern Conference in 2013. Both teams’ on-ice performances have declined greatly since then, but the emotions have not.
And with an all-divisional schedule, the Hawks would be seeing the Wings — and the six other Central teams — quite a lot: eight or nine times each, in fact.
The NHL is expected to utilize baseball-like “series” in the regular season this year. It remains unclear whether that’ll be two-game series in back-to-back formats, or three-game series over four- or five-day spans.
Either way, it should cut down significantly on travel costs and coronavirus exposure, limiting teams to 10 to 15 separate hotel stays all season.
Before the schedule can be fully unveiled, however, the league and its players must sort out a complicated argument about salary escrow — in simple terms, salary withheld by the league — and deferral, Friedman reported. Owners say the financial fallout of the pandemic requires a higher escrow percentage, both this year and in the years to come; players believe a concession they made over the summer should suffice.
