Amid the coronavirus pandemic, which paused the season March 12 and has disrupted society around the world, the NHL is coming back with its largest, most complex event ever. From scratch, on the fly, in a matter of weeks, it is creating a completely new way of competing, living and viewing while keeping everyone safe.
The NHL is staging an unprecedented 24-team tournament in Edmonton and Toronto, starting Aug. 1 and ending as late as Oct. 4. It is making teams and staff comfortable while restricting them to Secure Zones and requiring them to follow strict protocols. It is overhauling the game presentation without fans in the stands.
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The hurdles are immense, the details countless. The NHL is making the best of a bad situation. No, wait. That’s an understatement. The goal is to transform a bad situation into something spectacular — creative, different and made-for-TV, and yet worthy of the tradition the Stanley Cup.
“This is unheard of,” said NHL chief content officer Steve Mayer, who oversees the production and has been in Edmonton for 11 days already. “It’s an awesome challenge. Every one of us is just welcoming it. You know, like, ‘bring it on’ is the general call. Like, let’s do it.
“I think when you’re in the event business, you sort of look for moments like this where you seize the whole everything and you run with it, and in some ways, we’re nuts. We’ve got a screw loose. But we love this kind of stuff. This is what we’re all built for. This is what we do.”
Remember, the regular season was humming along as usual, and then one day it screeched to a halt. There was no playbook to consult. Worse, there was no certainty as to how the pandemic would play out. Even worse, the situation was evolving differently, in terms of the coronavirus and local governments’ responses to it, in each NHL market.
Long story short, the NHL determined it needed to return in NHL arenas because of the infrastructure they afforded. It came up with a list of things needed in a hub city and solicited proposals. Together with the NHL Players’ Association and health officials, it crafted the Return to Play Plan.
The NHL thought the hub cities would be Las Vegas and Vancouver, then switched to Edmonton and Toronto for safety and logistical reasons. That increased the degree of difficulty.
“We lost two weeks when we decided not to go there,” Mayer said, “because we were planning specifically for those two places.”
The NHL has critical infrastructure and experience from staging games outdoors and overseas. It has played in cities from Shanghai to Stockholm and built rinks in baseball and football stadiums. It also has staged the World Cup of Hockey 2016 at what is now a hub, Scotiabank Arena in Toronto. The veteran event staff knows how to solve problems and has a been-there, done-that, can-do attitude.
This, though, is the ultimate test for every NHL department.
“This could not be done as well as it will be unless we have this team in place,” Mayer said. “The difference between this and every other event we’ve done, we have had almost on every occasion at least a year to prepare, and (one of) our events can fit into one tenth of this.
“There is not one event that we’ve done that can remotely compare to the scale of this, because we’ve never had to open up the restaurants. We’ve never had to build team lounges. We’ve never had to have coaches rooms in multiple places. We’ve never had to put fencing around a city. We’ve never had a security detail even remotely like this. And we’ve certainly never had testing for 900 people in two sites.”
You can’t, for example, simply partner with local chefs to pop up two restaurants in Edmonton to give diners more options in the Secure Zone, including a sushi spot in Rogers Place. You have to do it without transmitting the coronavirus.
“You’ve got to make sure the seats are social-distanced,” Mayer said. “We have to do a cleaning after every sitting. The way the servers come out, they have to be educated on how they present food. The menus, many of them are going to be online. You go to a bar code that’s on your table and the menu pops up on your phone. These are all the various aspects of just what used to be, and it wasn’t simple, but used to be …
“One step is now 10 steps. There’s not a decision that’s made without consulting the medical team, understanding protocol and how it fits in, and that just makes it so much more difficult.”
And hopefully so much more rewarding. If the NHL pulls this off, the team that wins the Stanley Cup will have accomplished something that will be remembered forever. So will the team that made it possible.
NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman said awarding the Stanley Cup would be a “relief.”
“The long journey,” Commissioner Bettman said, “still has many miles to go.”
