It says something that Las Vegas appears to have been passed over as one of the NHL’s long-awaited pair of hub cities.
Vegas, after all, was the odds-on front-runner from the beginning, the players’ choice from the start. And you can understand why. If you’re a pro athlete staring down the prospect of a months-long lockdown in a pandemic-proof bubble in an end-times pursuit of the Stanley Cup, a city constructed as an adult amusement park figured to be a passable setting. Work’s work, after all. But Vegas might turn a monotonous grind into a slightly more eventful one. If you were ready to roll the dice with your health, both mental and physical, in service to your franchise and in pursuit of money and legacy, why not have the option of also rolling some actual dice?
Alas, as the league lurches closer to its goal of dropping a puck in the midst of a pandemic — and the scheduled start for the play-in round, where the Maple Leafs face Columbus in a best-of-five series, is July 30 — it says something that Sin City, with all the distractions, couldn’t ultimately convince the NHL and its players that it was one of the two best options to hold one half of the league’s 24-team Stanley Cup tournament. Pending majority approval by the membership of the NHL Players’ Association, it’s expected Toronto and Edmonton will be the ultimate winners in that sweepstakes. Happy Canada Day, in other words: As coronavirus responses go, the northland hasn’t been exactly perfect. But stacked next to the disastrous results south of the border, Canada’s respectability looks downright utopian.
Make no mistake: It was the alarming, apparently unabating spike in cases of the virus in the U.S. — and specifically in Clark County, where Las Vegas is situated — that brought us to a place where it looks as though the Cup, if it is awarded at all this year, will be handed over on Canadian soil.
The NHL, which has already seen about five per cent of the players expected to participate in the return-to-play tournament test positive for coronavirus, clearly didn’t want to find itself in the situation the NBA is currently facing — attempting to construct a return-to-play bubble in the midst of another state that’s a raging coronavirus hot spot. In the case of the NBA, which also passed over Las Vegas as an option, that’s Florida, home to the Walt Disney World campus where the Raptors are scheduled to resume their championship defence Aug. 1 in a not-so-regular season game against LeBron James and the L.A. Lakers. Toronto FC, which is already ensconced at Disney preparing for the MLS Is Back Tournament, is scheduled to begin play July 10, pandemic permitting.
As this ongoing exercise in returning pro sports back to the start line is proving, location matters. You can preach the importance of protocols to players. You can draw up rules. You can even impose the threat of discipline on those who break the rules (and the NBA has said it will effectively suspend players who burst the bubble by saddling them with a minimum 10-day quarantine period). But protocols aren’t a prison. A resort with rules isn’t a jail. And human nature can be a difficult beast to contain.
If you speak to executives and player agents connected to Toronto’s main teams, you know there’s a high level of skepticism that any professional sports bubble will be airtight. Pro athletes, mostly accustomed to unlimited options, aren’t suddenly going to morph into monks. There will be leaks.
But if a bubble proves leaky in Toronto or Edmonton, where cases have been on the decline, the risk to players is theoretically a lot lower than if one spouts a leak in Nevada or Florida, where cases have been going in the wrong direction more days than not.
The NHL’s smart acknowledgment of that reality makes, say, Major League Baseball’s plan to begin a 60-game season later this month seem far-fetched. While the NHL and NBA have painstakingly planned their fixed-site residencies, baseball somehow believes it’ll succeed in allowing its 30 teams to spend the rest of the summer hopscotching through a collection of North America’s airports and hotels and ballparks. Disregard the shuttered U.S.-Canada border. The folks who run the Blue Jays somehow believe their team and its multiple opponents ought be allowed to fly back and forth between the disparate coronavirus situations. No one connected to the team or to the sport has explained the science behind how that’s going to benefit Canada.
How does hosting the hub benefit Toronto? Fans won’t be able to go to games or gather outside Scotiabank Arena when the Maple Leafs are playing — at least not in the numbers a playoff game would normally inspire. Autograph seekers won’t be able to access players. Some hotels and restaurants will make out OK. But considering the arena is essentially being converted into a TV studio, the games could just as well be happening on the moon, such figures to be the peripheral atmosphere. Maybe there’ll be some familiarity for the only true home team. But the lack of a home crowd will theoretically mitigate those effects.
We say “theoretically” because, if you’ve been paying attention to the situation, you know nothing’s a sure thing. On Tuesday NBA commissioner Adam Silver, a relative truth teller among sports power brokers, acknowledged the possibility that his league’s reboot, as painstakingly planned as it has been, could still go kaput.
“We haven’t put a precise number on it, but if we were to see a large number of cases and see spread in our community, that would, of course, be a cause to stop,” Silver said during an appearance on Time 100 Talks on Tuesday.
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Silver knows the truth: The NBA community, as much as it’ll attempt to separate itself from the Florida community in which it’ll set up shop, won’t be existing in true isolation. The NBA, like the NHL, has already seen a raft of positive tests among its players. And human nature is a difficult beast to contain. There will be leaks. Exactly how many will be deemed too many is the question nobody can answer just yet. But if everybody’s just rolling the dice, the NHL has to feel awfully good that it’s laying its bets in a country that’s had slightly better luck navigating these uncertain days.
“Much is unpredictable,” Silver said Tuesday. “If cases are isolated, that’s one thing. But if we had a lot of cases, we’re going to stop. We are left with no choice but to learn to live with this virus. No options are risk-free right now.”
