Upcoming N.H.L. Season Will Have Flashes of Other Difficult Eras
N
NY Times Hockey
Summary: This is a summary of an article originally published by NY Times Hockey. Read the full original article here →
All of the Canadian teams will be in the same division, as they were in the late 1920s and most of the 1930s. And as during World War II, external circumstances will affect roster sizes. The first time a pandemic halted a professional hockey season was in 1919, when an outbreak of the Spanish flu ended the Stanley Cup finals before a champion could be crowned.
A century later, amid the dread of the coronavirus pandemic, the N.H.L. did what hockey authorities couldn’t do back then, recalibrating after a shutdown to finish the 2019-20 campaign in two Canadian bubbles, with the Tampa Bay Lightning winning the Stanley Cup in September. Now, as the N.H.L. prepares for the mid-January start of a second season that will be impacted by the virus, crises and contingencies echo from deep in the league’s 103-year history.
With the league’s 31 teams realigned to eliminate cross-border travel during the regular season, the N.H.L. will, for the first time in its history, have every Canadian team, all seven of them, alone in one division. There is something of a precedent for that: Starting in 1926, when the Rangers made their debut, and lasting through 1938, the N.H.L. split its teams into Canadian and American divisions.
In 1939, when Canada went to war, five of the seven N.H.L. teams were based in the U.S. , but hockey still predominantly ran on Canadian fuel: That season, 90 percent of the players had been born north of the border.
A century later, amid the dread of the coronavirus pandemic, the N.H.L. did what hockey authorities couldn’t do back then, recalibrating after a shutdown to finish the 2019-20 campaign in two Canadian bubbles, with the Tampa Bay Lightning winning the Stanley Cup in September. Now, as the N.H.L. prepares for the mid-January start of a second season that will be impacted by the virus, crises and contingencies echo from deep in the league’s 103-year history.
With the league’s 31 teams realigned to eliminate cross-border travel during the regular season, the N.H.L. will, for the first time in its history, have every Canadian team, all seven of them, alone in one division. There is something of a precedent for that: Starting in 1926, when the Rangers made their debut, and lasting through 1938, the N.H.L. split its teams into Canadian and American divisions.
In 1939, when Canada went to war, five of the seven N.H.L. teams were based in the U.S. , but hockey still predominantly ran on Canadian fuel: That season, 90 percent of the players had been born north of the border.