NHL playoffs in a bubble will be weird, wacky and unprecedented. Strap in.
“The intensity is still going to be there,” Washington Capitals goaltender Braden Holtby said. “When you get in a playoff mentality, you get on the ice, you know what you’re playing for. I think it’ll be ramped up and it’ll be very, very competitive.”
This fall, when all that happens, it will be different, for sure. The global pandemic caused by the novel coronavirus ensures that. Have people yet done keg stands over Zoom? The 2020 Cup winner may be the characters who inspire such behavior.
But make no mistake: This counts. Hockey people routinely posit that the Stanley Cup playoffs provide the most difficult postseason to endure in sports. When you watch them play out — the pain inflicted, just the sheer exhaustion after each game and each series — it’s hard to argue. There won’t be fans in the stands this summer. There won’t be any meaningful home-ice advantage. But the other elements, they’ll be there.
“The players have a good sense of what’s at stake,” Capitals General Manager Brian MacLellan said.
Translation: When they etch the names of one team on the Cup, they won’t also etch in asterisks.
“Ever since training camp started and we got to Toronto,” forward Carl Hagelin said, “our goal was to win the Stanley Cup.”
This is all great, a chance to talk about line combinations and penalty-killing prowess and the steps it takes to win a championship. Even the games thus far — the round-robin tournaments played by the top four seeds in each conference as well as the best-of-five play-in series contested by seeds 5 through 12 — have ratcheted up in intensity as play has progressed. There’s reason to believe that the absolute pit-of-the-stomach nerves that come with playoff hockey can be replicated in these bubbles.
“The one thing you take away from this whole thing: Yes, 100 percent, a chance to win a Stanley Cup,” Capitals Coach Todd Reirden said. “Our players are excited about that. Our organization’s excited about trying to accomplish that again. We’re fortunate that we’re able to play hockey right now, and we’re able provide a distraction for all different fans all over the world and provide some entertainment that way so that they can get back to normalcy. That’s the big thing for us.”
That entertainment has come at a price that in a month’s time has turned pessimism into optimism. Three months ago, the prospects of pulling this off seemed dubious. Now, I’d be surprised if the Cup isn’t awarded.
“I think everyone wanted it to happen, but I think there was some doubt,” MacLellan said. “How could there not be with what was going on? The infection rates in different areas, all the numbers. How could we, as a league, organize it and pull it off? There were a lot of variables, a lot of protocols, a lot of work done at the league level to even make it a possibility.”
Baseball and football should take note of what the NHL and NBA — which is hosting its own inside-the-bubble tournament outside Orlando — are pulling off. The NHL and the players’ association saw fit to create two bubbles — one in Toronto for the Eastern Conference, the other in Edmonton for the West. By all accounts, they’re essentially airtight. Players and staff go from the hotel to a shuttle to the rink to a shuttle and back to the rink — nowhere else. The reminders of the proper protocols — wear your mask, keep six feet apart — are everywhere.
“I think it’s definitely met expectations, maybe exceeded,” Capitals forward Tom Wilson said. “I think we’re pretty lucky. It’s felt pretty normal. It’s felt pretty seamless. They’ve done a great job of making us feel safe. … They’ve done everything they can to make it as safe as possible, I think, providing a confidence to the players that you can just worry about playing hockey, worry about doing your job.”
The job for the Capitals is four wins against the New York Islanders, their matchup in the first round. And because the NHL has done such a superlative job of creating and maintaining these bubbles, it seems like it will be reasonable to discuss issues that will help decide this whole thing.
What wondrous questions to consider. The fury, this year, will be unleashed not on F Street in the District but north of the border, not with fans rocking the red in person but with piped-in noise and goal celebrations in which the players can be heard above the din. Will it be weird? Sure. Will it count? Absolutely. Strap in and enjoy.
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