Sportsnet: Elliotte Friedman on Sportsnet 590 this morning on where the Canadian teams could relocate to if they were not able to play in Canada and had to go to the U.S.. What would happen with the Canadian division?
** NHLRumors.com transcription
“I lack clarity right now on that. I’ll say this, I heard a couple weeks ago that there were contingency plans out there that, for example the Jets ECHL team is in Jacksonville. And I heard a rumor, and it was a decent source, that maybe those teams were going to have to consider playing there. And I looked into it at the time, and like I said, this was a couple weeks ago, and people said that’s not going to be happening. It shows you how much reality changes in this day and age because as this was breaking yesterday I reached back to that person and he was kind of laughing and said, ‘you know, I’m ahead of my time.’
But I wonder. So the question would be: Is it a hub? Would all seven teams go to one hub or would you have to do things like that? Like I saw, I think Jim Mattheson yesterday on twitter from Edmonton was saying you could go places like Milwaukee, or if AHL teams don’t play this year, you could go to their arenas. But I was wondering if the Canadian teams who have ECHL affiliates, like I said Winnipeg in Jacksonville, Toronto in Orlando (* Toronto’s ECHL team is now in Newfoundland), Calgary’s is in Kansas City although they are playing. Maybe that would have to be the situation. Those aren’t NHL quality arenas but they are places you can play.
Friedman was asked division wise, what it would it do to the Canadian division? Would they go back to the regular divisions were used to?
“Well, I like I said George, there was a lot yesterday that that could happen. But like I said, there was someone last night who made the good point, what if the players say we’ll do this but the moment it clears up we want to come back.
For example, Mark Giordano, he lives in Calgary all year round. Pettersson from Vancouver, he stayed in Vancouver. He didn’t go back to Sweden. There’s Mitch Marner. I saw his quote with Luke Fox yesterday and he’s a Toronto guy. How many of these guys are going to say, ‘when this is over, when the government clears up, we want to come back.’ If that is the case, you can’t break up the Canadian division.
So I think in a lot of ways it could be up to the players. They were told about this yesterday. How do they react to all this? You know, we’ll see if the Canadian government or the various provincial governments feel any pressure to act out of this story being broken by Chris yesterday.
I mean, like I said, there is a lot of limbo. There is a lot of people, really uncertain since it broke yesterday and it really started to become an issue in the last few days. I think there are a lot of people who are really uncertain to what this means. Does it throw the start of the season back? Does it force the governments to make any kind of announcements?
I saw Doug Ford this morning say that Ontario is going to have an emergency meeting. They might simply say, ‘were not really interested in dealing with this right now.’ I think Ontario is one of the provinces that has been very careful. I think British Columbia’s been another. I can see them just simply saying, ‘we can’t deal with this right now.’
So I think it’s going to take us a couple, maybe a day to two to kind of figure out George where this is all going to land.”
Canadian teams may have issues getting approval to play in Canada