Hours before puck drop for the Stanley Cup Final to cap the NHL's 2019-20 season, league commissioner Gary Bettman held his annual press conference and reiterated that the 2020-21 season is still an unknown.
"Anything that anybody suggests or reads or writes or commentates about next season is nothing more than speculation," he said Saturday in a Zoom call with reporters. "Obviously we've started informally thinking about what optionality is. Dec. 1 has always been a notional date. I will not be surprised if it slips into later December, it could slip into January.
"But there's no point right now [in] making any definitive comments on our plans, because there's still too much we don't know."
What exactly are the unknowns? As Bettman stated, it's still not certain when the Canada-U.S. border will reopen to non-essential travel and it's not clear what the COVID-19 pandemic will look like in the coming months. The latter, of course, impacts fans attending games: Will there be spectators? If they are allowed, do they have to be socially distanced or can arenas be filled like the good old days?
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One interesting point Bettman brought up regarding attendance: Just because the season may not start with fans in the building, that doesn't mean it'll continue that way through the full slate of games.
"If we're going to speculate, and this is pure speculation, I'm just throwing it out there as a random thought: It's conceivable that we start without fans, that we move to socially distant fans at some point and by some point in time, maybe, our buildings are open," he said. "I'm not saying that's the case, but if you're thinking through all of the conceivable possibilities — there's full, there's empty, there's a combination — and again, how we start doesn't necessarily mean that's how we have to finish."
Regardless of whether fans will be able to watch their favorite team in person or when the games will actually start, the commissioner did stress once again that he would like the next season to be business as usual.
"I anticipate playing a full season next season — 82 games, full playoffs," Bettman said, adding that he'd prefer future seasons to not cross the summer months. "How and when we do that is something that we don't all have enough information to make any decisions and anything would just be sheer speculation.
"Our goal is to get back to the greatest sense of normalcy as possible under whatever circumstances are presented."