NHL asks teams for August arena dates

The National Hockey League keeps looking at different scenarios in order to resume the 2019-20 season once the COVID-19 pandemic gets under control and on Tuesday, TSN’s Bob McKenzie reveals that the league asked teams for August arena dates. 

“The National Hockey League did request from each of its member 31 clubs to provide available home dates for the month of August. So as you said, James, nobody knows anything for sure. But what we can start to figure out here, is if we’re going to have a playoffs that have 2020 in front of them, there’s a real good chance it could be as late as August.”

This is starting to look more and more like the proposition made by players last week with August-September to finish the 2019-20 season, meaning the 2020-21 campaign would only kick off in November.

This would mean that the 2020-21 season would take place on a condensed schedule, but with a total of 82 games per team nonetheless.

It remains to be seen what the coronavirus will have to say about that…