November is the time of year when we’d normally be celebrating, or fuming over, the Dallas Stars’ current record and whether they’d be a playoffs team by Thanksgiving.
Instead, the NHL is in a weird, COVID-induced limbo. After pulling off an almost miraculously successful Stanley Cup playoffs mini-season with its Return to Play plan, the league is now trying to figure out what it does for an encore.
It will take a fair amount of divergent thinking to pull off a 2021 season, but Gary Bettman seems open to almost all of it – including a truncated schedule and a modified a hub-city system that will allow teams to play in their own arenas for at least part of the year.