About a minute before the NHL Entry Draft broadcast began on day one, when all minds were on the top 31 picks, the NHL announced that their “notional” date for the start of the next season was moving from December 1, 2020 to January 1, 2021.
It wasn’t a shock to hear that there would be no more NHL hockey in 2020. I’d assumed that to be true before the playoffs actually started and acted accordingly — I watched a lot of games the way you eat a lot tomatoes in September as the plants start die and the squirrels keep taking them to bury.