What would a late-July season restart look like in the NHL?

The NHL is looking at all possible angles for a return to play later this year, including a player proposal that would see the Stanley Cup awarded in September.

Nothing is off the table for the NHL, it seems, when it comes to ideas on how to get the league back up and running when given the all-clear. All sports have halted in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, which has shuttered the NHL for the foreseeable future and has put the rest of the 2019-20 season in jeopardy.

The NHL has been out of commission for less than a week now, but the league is already looking at possible avenues of return for the coming months. One of them includes a 24-team playoff format, which would be pure concentrated chaos on top of an already anarchic few months of hockey that dominate the end of the season.

The other, which surfaced on Tuesday, is the idea of the NHL making its return in the summer, possibly as late as July with the Stanley Cup being awarded in September. The idea, which was floated on TSN’s Insider Trading segment, came with a wonderful graphic to demonstrate the timeline we could potentially be looking at here.

On Monday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention gave a recommendation that gatherings of 50 or more people be canceled or postponed for the next eight weeks, meaning the NHL would be set to return in some capacity by May 1 at the earliest. The NHL is now allowing players to return to their home states and countries, signaling that the league is in for the long haul with this.

According to this proposed timeline, the NHL would resume with a mini training camp before an abbreviated season in late July, with the playoffs rolling through August and September. The more interesting aspect of this timeline is the shortened “offseason” of the month of October, where the draft and free agency would take place before the 2020-21 season would start in November.

One would guess that the 2020-21 season would be condensed in some form, whether that be the removal of All-Star weekend or a shortening of each team’s bye weeks.

The reasoning behind this proposal seems to stem from the thought that if the NHL does restart in May and a player tests positive for coronavirus, the league will have to be shut down again. It’s a cautious proposal from a time standpoint, but an ambitious one in getting the remainder of the 2019-20 regular season played before the postseason.

That would eliminate the need for a 24-team playoff, but would be a lot of hockey to play within such a short period of time.

The lack of a true offseason between the two seasons is also intriguing, as there’d be less than two months between the awarding of the 2020 Stanley Cup and the start of training camps for the following season.

No plans for the rest of the 2019-20 season have been put in place, but it’s good to see the NHL listening to every idea in such an unprecedented time. Though this proposed format for the 2019-20 season may not come to pass, it’s a nice peak behind the curtain of what the league and the players are trying to put together to salvage the rest of the season.

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