The NHL is trying to make this seem easy. This is the opposite. This is nothing less than a historic company, something we have never seen before and hope never to see again.
Amid the coronavirus pandemic, which paused the season on March 12 and has disrupted society around the world, the NHL returns with its biggest and most complex event. From scratch, on the go, in a matter of weeks, you are creating a whole new way to compete, live and see while keeping everyone safe.
The NHL is hosting an unprecedented 24-team tournament in Edmonton and Toronto, which begins on August 1 and runs through October 4. It is making teams and staff comfortable by restricting them to safe areas and requiring them to follow strict protocols. He is reviewing the presentation of the game without fans in the stands.
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The obstacles are immense, the details are countless. The NHL is making the best of a bad situation. No wait. That is an understatement. The goal is to transform a bad situation into something spectacular: creative, different and made for television, but worthy of the Stanley Cup tradition.
“This is unheard of,” said NHL chief content officer Steve Mayer, who oversees production and has been in Edmonton for 11 days. “It’s an incredible challenge. Each one of us welcomes it. You know, like, ‘Bring him’ is the general call. Like, let’s do it.
“I think when you’re in the event business, you’re looking for times like this where you take advantage of everything and run with it, and somehow, we’re crazy. We have a screw loose.” But we love this kind of thing. That’s what we are all made for. This is what we do “.
Remember, the regular season was buzzing like always, and then one day it stopped. There was no playbook to consult. Worse still, there was no certainty of how the pandemic would unfold. Worse yet, the situation was evolving differently, in terms of the coronavirus and local government responses to it, in each NHL market.
Simply put, the NHL determined that it needed to return to the NHL arenas because of the infrastructure they offered. He came up with a list of necessary things in a central city and asked for proposals. Together with the NHL Players Association and health officials, he developed the Return to Play Plan.
The NHL thought the core cities would be Las Vegas and Vancouver, then moved to Edmonton and Toronto for security and logistics 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 a critical infrastructure and experience in staging outdoor and foreign games. He has played in cities from Shanghai to Stockholm and has built tracks in baseball and soccer stadiums. He has also hosted the 2016 Hockey World Cup at what is now a hub, the Scotiabank Arena in Toronto. The event’s veteran staff knows how to solve problems and has a “be there, do and do” attitude.
However, this is the ultimate test for all NHL departments.
“This could not be done as well as it would be unless we have this team,” Mayer said. “The difference between this and any other event we’ve ever done, we’ve had almost every year at least a year to prepare, and (one of) our events can fit a tenth of this.”
“There is no event that we have done that can remotely compare to the scale of this, because we have never had to open restaurants. We have never had to build team rooms. We have never had to have coaches in multiple locations. We have never had to putting fences around a city. We’ve never had a security detail even remotely like this. And we’ve certainly never had testing for 900 people at two sites. “
You can’t, for example, simply partner with local chefs to open two restaurants in Edmonton to offer diners more options in the Safe Zone, including a sushi place at Rogers Place. You have to do it without transmitting the coronavirus.
“You have to make sure that the seats have social distance,” Mayer said. “We have to do a cleanup after each session. The way the servers run, they have to be educated on how they present the food. The menus, many of them will be online. Go to a barcode that is on your la table and menu appear on your phone these are all the various aspects of what it used to be and it wasn’t simple but it used to be …
“One step now is 10 steps. A decision is not made without consulting the medical team, understanding the protocol and how it fits, and that makes it much more difficult.”
And hopefully much more rewarding. If the NHL does this, 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,” said Commissioner Bettman, “still has many miles to go.”
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