End of November the cut-off date for an agreement for a January 1st start?
Sportsnet: Elliotte Friedman on Hockey Central on when the cutoff date to hammer out an agreement for them to have a January 1st start date.
** NHLrumors.com transcription
“There was a team last night who said to me they thought it was this weekend. I don’t think that’s necessarily true, Nick. I’ll tell you when Gary Bettman says, and Bill Daly deputy commissioner, they say they want to play January 1st. They’re not BSing us. They, I think they’ve surprised people by how they determined are to do this, but they really want to try and do it.
I mean, the more games the better it is for your TV revenue and things like that, and it also gives you more runway if COVID wrecks havoc with your season. So, they really want to do it.
So my guess is, we’ve got to know sometime between U.S. Thanksgiving and the end of November. Now, I’ve written that and said that, and I’ve had teams who have reached out to me and said, “that is way too tight of a schedule.” But one thing I do believe Nic is they will try and like crush some things or squish some things to get stuff done.
Most players are skating right now, skating or playing. More and more of them have kind of made their way back to North America. I don’t think these players, like do we go from three exhibition games to two? Like the one thing, people have been consistent and telling me is, if they have to compress things to make it work, they will try.
But I think we have to know latest end of November if we’re going to play by January 1st.”
The NHL may learn some things from how the 2020-21 NHL schedule may be constructed
Sportsnet: Luke Fox on Sportsnet 590 on the possibility of teams playing a 60 game season in their home buildings and not in a hub and what the NHL could learn from it.
** NHLrumors.com transcription
“Yeah, it’s been a bit fascinating. You know I understand from the owner’s perspective why they don’t want hubs. They want local TV. They want local start times. Their fan bases are used to watching their teams at certain times. They have board ads sold. There’s a lot that goes into it.
So, I understand why they want to do it that way. I think we’re in for a very truncated(?) schedule, one with tons of back-to-backs, heavy workload on the players.
I do think one of the positives that could come from this if there is traveling, is that maybe they take a look in the future about the traveling schedule.
I remember Jonathan Toews spoke about his one time about how the NHL schedule isn’t very ‘green.’ It’s not very environmentally friendly and maybe it could maybe lean a little bit more to the baseball way where you go into a town and you play a team a few times, and do that as opposed to zipping around the country for just one game. It gets very expensive and it’s bad for the environment.
So, I think maybe there could be some positives that come out of this and how the NHL looks at their travel.”