NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman Outlines Plan For 2020 Stanley Cup Playoffs, Draft Lottery

Keeping health and safety at the forefront, NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman outlined details of a plan that still leaves a number of key questions unanswered during his Return To Play announcement and media availability on Tuesday.

Bettman estimated that somewhere in the range of 25-30,000 coronavirus tests would be required for the league to accomplish its stated goal of getting players on qualifying teams back to their home cities for a training camp, then to one of two ‘hub cities’ to begin a unique 24-team playoff with the stated goal of awarding the 2020 Stanley Cup.

“We need to make sure that there’s enough testing available — and we’ll be needing lots and lots of testing but we don’t want it to interfere with the medical needs of the community,” Bettman said. “That has to come first.”

“Some independent medical advisors tell us that by the time we’re doing this, over the summer, that will be a relatively insignificant number of tests relative to the number of tests that will be available.”

“It’s the one thing that you can’t compromise on — that’s what it comes down to,” said NHL Players’ Association executive director Donald Fehr in an interview Tuesday afternoon on the ‘Tim and Sid’ show on Sportsnet. “The nature of most labor agreements certainly, you look for a way to find compromises. ‘If I do this for you, you’ll do this for me.’

“You can’t do that with the health concerns. You have to be satisfied that you’ve done everything you can, everything that’s reasonably possible. The public health authorities in the various states and provinces are in agreement that you can go forward, and that you have to implement it right. You’ve got to get it right.”

With those protocols front and center, the NHL’s return-to-play plan has been approved by the NHL’s Board of Governors and the NHL Players’ Association.

The announcement came on the heels of last week’s 29-2 vote by the NHLPA to continue discussions on a 24-team return to play format. On Monday, the league released its Phased Return To Sport Protocol, which outlined the details involved in getting players onto the ice and into the weight room for voluntary workouts as part of ‘Phase 2’ of the four-step program, which could begin as early as next week.

Bettman sees the entire return-to-play process as a continuum, with timing that will be determined as they go along. “There’s a reason that we’re not giving you dates now,” he said, “because anybody can gives you a date is guessing. We think we’d rather take a more holistic approach to doing this.”

Player needs will help determine that timeline.

“When we get through Phase 2, we’re going to get a better sense of when to start training camp and how long we need to have training camp in Phase 3,” Bettman said. “Then, we’ll move to Phase 4.

“I think it’s conceivable that we’re playing at the end of July — could be the beginning of August and then playing into September. So, somewhere around that timeframe. It may be that things open up quicker if players get back sooner, they feel they’re in shape, that they don’t want a prolonged training camp. That, we’re going to take our guidance from the players on.”

Now confirmed — the structure of the 24-team format.

The top four teams in each conference, based on points percentage when the season was paused, will play a round-robin tournament against each other to determine seeding and help get themselves into game shape.

In the Eastern Conference, the Boston Bruins, Tampa Bay Lightning, Washington Capitals and Philadelphia Flyers will get the first-round bye. In the West, it’s the St. Louis Blues, Colorado Avalanche, Vegas Golden Knights and Dallas Stars.

Meanwhile, the bottom eight qualifying teams in each conference will go head-to-head in a best-of-five series that will determine the official 16-team playoff bracket.

Play-in matchups will look like this:

Still to be determined: whether or not the playoffs will be played in a strict bracket format, or if there will be re-seeding after one or more rounds. Also uncertain: the length of the first two rounds of the ‘regular’ playoffs, which could be best-of-five or best-of-seven series.

The Conference Finals and Stanley Cup Final are confirmed to be best-of-sevens and there’s a chance, if the Covid-19 situation allows when the time comes, that those final rounds might be played in participating teams’ home markets.

Bettman says that the league has three to four weeks to make a final decision on which hub cities would be most suitable. Right now, there are 10 markets on the list:

Bettman says when the time is right, the league will be looking for markets with low levels of Covid-19 infection and easy availability of testing.

With seven Western Conference cities on the list, Bettman acknowledged that the league wasn’t necessarily looking to pick one hub city from each conference. “We’re not hung up on East/West. For TV scheduling, it may be better if we’re in different time zones, but we’re going to go to the places that we think are the safest and make the most sense, medically, at the time.”

Canadian markets like Vancouver and Edmonton currently have very low Covid-19 infection rates — and a weak Canadian dollar could save the league some money if it was to set up north of the border. But deputy commissioner Bill Daly acknowledged that right now, federal regulations requiring a 14-day quarantine for all travellers entering Canada from a foreign country could be an obstacle.

“We are having various discussions with various different departments in the Canadian government,” Daly said. “We don’t have a resolution there, but it’s an ongoing dialogue for sure.”

Additional Business

While establishing its playoff format, the league also officially declared the 2019-20 NHL regular season to be complete. Statistics and awards will stand based on the games completed before the season was paused on March 12 due to the Covid-19 pandemic. No date has been set yet for the presentation of the NHL Awards.

Some structure was presented for the 2020 NHL draft lottery, which could potentially be conducted in two phases.

Phase 1 will take place on June 26, the original date for Round 1 of this year’s draft.

Fifteen teams will be eligible — the seven teams that are not part of the 24-team tournament (Detroit, Ottawa, San Jose (pick traded to Ottawa), Los Angeles, Anaheim, New Jersey and Buffalo) and the eight teams that lose in the preliminary play-in round. Since those teams’ fate will not yet be decided when the lottery takes place, placeholders will be used to represent the odds of those eight teams.

As usual, three draws will be held. If the seven non-playoff teams win those three draws, then the draft order is set. If one or more of the ‘placeholders’ win one of the first three picks, then a second draw will take place after the play-in round to determine which of those losing team(s) moves up to claim a top three pick.

For the next four weeks at least, the 16 teams in the play-in round will be in contention for both a top-three pick in the draft and a shot at winning the Stanley Cup.

In 2019-20, the NHL was on track to earn about $5 billion in total revenue before the shutdown in March came with about 80% of the regular-season schedule complete. That has caused a shortfall of roughly $1 billion if no further games are played.

Bettman emphasized that the league’s main goal in completing the season is to provide a sense of normalcy to a society that has struggled under never-before-seen restrictions and tremendous loss of life during the global pandemic.

“We think sports does brings people together and it helps them heal from difficult times,” Bettman told ‘Tim and Sid.’ “Yes, the economic consequences of this are terrible, but finishing the season is more about finishing the season than it is about the economics, by a longshot.”

On Tuesday, Bettman estimated that the cost of testing alone under the league’s return-to-play plan would run into the millions of dollars, and that the total cost of mounting this once-in-a-lifetime playoff tournament would run into the tens of millions.

But even without fans in the stands, television and sponsor revenue from this tournament should still make the summer tournament a profitable affair. It will help offset some of the damage from the lost games — and might even help draw in new fans, depending on what other major North American sports get back to action by summer.

Lots of work remains to be done. But for now the question looks like one of when, not if, the NHL will get back on the ice.