This notion that the Stanley Cup playoffs will be a greater challenge this year than ever before is nonsense. Promotional nonsense spewed out by the NHL, which is desperate to attract eyeballs starting next weekend by making it seem as though we are about to witness the most frantic, intense competition in league history.
The NHL versus the Coronavirus. Game on.
Now, if you suggested it will be harder to win the Cup under this awkward summer format than in pre-1967 days, when a team only needed to play two series before hoisting the trophy, that might make some sense. If you suggested it will be more arduous than the days when all the ’67 expansion teams were piled into one sub-mediocre conference, sure.
But compared to the last 40 years? Nonsense.
The two most significant elements that have defined the physical and mental challenge of winning an NHL championship since 1980, folks, have been removed.
First, the punishing travel is gone. The biggest road trip will be for those teams that have to take the three-hour plane ride from Toronto to Edmonton for the final stages of the playoffs. That’s it. Otherwise, it’s a series of games in the same location.
Second, NHL teams have traditionally entered the post-season battered and on the limp. After 80 or more games, every player is injured to some extent. Those injuries, the absence of key players and the fatigue of the previous eight months have to be carried as a dead weight for eight more weeks by the eventual winner.
By comparison, the 24 teams entering these playdowns are extremely well rested after more than four months of inactivity. NHL clubs have been idle for so long a number of high-profile players have had time to get over serious injuries or surgeries. Chicago’s Brent Seabrook had three surgeries in December and January, and now he’s ready to compete again.
Compared to other playoff years, the 2020 playoffs are like running a marathon in comfortable 18-degree temperatures versus 35 degrees. If you’ve actually been up close and personal with an NHL team that’s won three playoff series and made it to the Stanley Cup final, you see the cuts and bruises, you see the lost weight and hollowed-out cheeks. You see the physical and psychological wear and tear of a very challenging competition that comes after eight hard months of regular-season play.
It won’t be easy to win the Cup this year, mind you. The team that emerges will be a worthy champion. But the nature of the competition, with all the teams rested and healthy and sequestered in hotels, means the biggest competitive question may be how quickly the players get bored of pickleball.
Or whether, like Lou Williams, they just can’t control themselves and need to sneak out to visit any variety of off-ice establishments. This will happen, despite the beliefs of some that hockey players are such strong team loyalists that they would never do such a thing, and based on the secrecy the NHL has wrapped this project in, the league will quickly cover up any indiscretions that do occur.
NHL players, because of their lucrative contracts, have long existed in a different world. But now they’ve had a truly separate world constructed for them by the league and their union where they don’t have to deal intimately with fans, media or even the demands of family. Yes, being separated from family is a legitimate problem that many players will have to deal with, but that has always been an issue for NHLers whose teams go deep into the post-season.
So believe this will be a difficult competition to win if you like, assuming it actually makes it to the finish. There are already signs baseball might not be able to actually finish the shortened season it has in mind.
Just don’t try to argue these Stanley Cup playoffs are more strenuous or more difficult in any way. They will be weirder, that’s for sure, and the teams that handle the weirdness better will have more success. Henrik Lundqvist arrived in Toronto carrying his guitar. Former Norris Trophy winner Duncan Keith hit the tarmac in Edmonton looking like The Undertaker. The Arizona Coyotes are going in with GM John Chayka having abruptly “quit,” according to a team press release, so that certainly adds yet another peculiar wrinkle for a team that certainly wasn’t even looking at post-season play when the season was stopped in March.
Playing in front of zero fans in what amounts to two large television studios will add to the strangeness. Having no fans in attendance hasn’t taken away from the television presentation of sports such as golf and Formula One racing, but Stanley Cup hockey is all about atmosphere and pandemonium and the electricity of the home fans.
They can pipe in all the special effects they want, but they can’t replicate the emotion of the Bell Centre in Montreal with Boston in town. Having the Panthers and the Islanders playing in an empty building in Toronto at 4 o’clock in the afternoon is going to have all the special feeling of Italy taking on Slovakia at an IIHF world championship held in Geneva.
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It’s going to be very interesting to see the TV numbers. Talk to some people and you get a sense that there’s this pent-up demand, that the return of NHL hockey will suddenly make our new normal seem less surreal. Talk to others and the concept of a 24-team tournament beginning in August generates no interest at all.
It will be really interesting to see which team emerges as the champion. Just don’t tell me it’s going to be more difficult to win the Cup than ever before.
