NHL rules out one-city remote location to resume play

There is a lot of bad news ever the NHL has decided to shut down its activities due to the COVID-19 pandemic, however, good news remains as the league and NHL Players’ Association remain focused on resuming the season even if it means July-August hockey. 

However, Pierre LeBrun explained on Tuesday’s edition of Insider Trading on TSN that it is very unlikely the NHL would consider going to one site only if it is forced to go the centralized route. That’s because the NHL doesn’t believe a single location would work for its purposes.

Earlier this week, it was reported that North Dakota could become a potential neutral site for NHL playoff games. But LeBrun explained how the one-city location scenario has more than likely been ruled out: 

“Not one location, that’s one thing that the league feels that is probably not going to happen for the NHL, or let’s put it this way, very unlikely as it was put to me today. We mentioned last week that one of the scenarios was four cities for 16 teams for example, that’s one format that they’ve discussed. They’ve also discussed maybe two cities as long as those two cities had two rinks per city that they could use - or another scenario has eight different cities, which is to say we’re really at the early stages of these types of discussions. There is no firm plan. They really have to keep waiting to see what the landscape will be in terms of if it’s even safe or feasible to try and resume the season. But certainly, that’s their goal right now.”

It sounds more likely that the NHL is looking at the potential of playing in four cities for 16 or in two locations, provided they each had two rinks apiece which the NHL could utilize.

However, it is too early to tell where that will be, seeing that the NHL still has a lot of potential scenarios on the table… 

But this one-city one seems to have been eliminated.