The National Hockey League halted all operations and closed player facilities just under a month ago thanks to the spread of the novel coronavirus. The Stanley Cup Playoffs were also supposed to begin earlier this week, but have also been delayed.
As options are being considered to potentially continue the 2019-20 season and have a chance to award the Stanley Cup, the NHL has been receiving offers to host playoff games in neutral sites. Among the reported sites include Manchester, New Hampshire; and Saskatoon, Saskatchewan.
“We do have people putting together the comprehensive laundry list of what we would need from facilities and evaluating some facilities on some level,” Daly said. “But I can’t tell you we’ve even finished creating a list [of potential sites], much less narrowed it down.”
However, Daly reiterated that so far there hasn’t been a target date discussed for the NHL to resume gameplay of regular season games.
“We’re just starting to get our minds around that,” Daly said. “It’s kind of a combination of things, like when we can start a regular season [in 2020-21] and how much time we need for an offseason, and then what does the playoff format look like, in terms of knowing what you need to have a regular season.”
The remaining regular season games would have gone a long way in determining a final playoff seeding, as there were several teams in competition for the final few positions in both conferences.
– – Quotes via Emily Kaplan and Greg Wyshynski of ESPN Link – –
