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A year after the Stanley Cup Finals buzz, a new normal

By Tom King - Staff Writer | May 26, 2020

A year ago Wednesday, the New England hockey world was buzzing.

It was Memorial Day, a day for solemn honoring of heroes as well as backyard barbecues, was a day in 2019 for something else: The start of the Stanley Cup Finals at the TD Garden.

The Boston Bruins vs. the St. Louis Blues, Game 1. The area all around Causeway Street was abuzz.

Locally, the Nashua Silver Knights were preparing for their players to report to Holman Stadium for their first workouts. The season opener was just two nights away, at Holman. Also, this was the week for the high school spring tournaments to begin, as coaches and players waited for the pairings to always come out the day after Memorial Day.

Lots going on.

Fast forward to the present. The Silver Knights and the Futures League are still hoping their plans for an abbreviated season beginning around July 1 and going through the middle to end of August can come to fruition.

And the National Hockey League will look to begin a thaw, as Tuesday it became the first of the four major sports leagues to unveil a return to play plan, announced by Commissioner Gary Bettman.

The regular season is done, and a 24 team playoff, 12 in each conference, will be held. The top four teams in both the Eastern and Western Conferences in points when the season was paused on March 12 will play a round robin to determine their seeding, while the other eight teams will be seeded and play a best of five play-in round.

So the Bruins won’t be the top seed as they were when the regular season ended prematurely – they’ll have to battle that out with Tampa, Washington and Philadelphia.

Everything is general, but the league is hoping to open practice facilities for small group workouts – presumed to be a maximum of six without coaches or instruction – as of early June.

Remember, this isn’t even training camp. It’s the training camp before the training camp, which Bettman wouldn’t start anytime before “the first half of July”.

Game on? Looks that way.

Where will the games be held? In two “hub”cities, but not the Hub. On the list from which two will be selected are Pittsburgh, Toronto, Columbus, Dallas, Edmonton, Chicago, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Minneapolis and Vancouver.

So forget about that thought of the Bruins playing another game this year in the TD Garden, evidently, even without fans.

But, you know what, we’ll take it while Major League Baseball and the NBA plod ahead with their return plans and union negotiations.

Meanwhile, we watch games from days gone by, but it’s hard to forget about last year’s Cup Finals, fresh in our minds. The Bruins won that Game 1, 4-2, but when they lost Game 2 in overtime the same night the Silver Knights opened at home, it was a signal that the fun ride over inferior opponents the previous three rounds was over. And we all remember that fateful Game 7 a couple of weeks later, the Blues’ 4-1 win on June 12 and Brad Marchand’s fateful skate to the bench that led to a 2-0 St. Louis lead at the end of the first period.

But you know what? As painful as that all was, we’d take it now. It will be interesting to see how everything plays out as we head into an uncertain summer when three sports could be playing games that count in July and August.

The new normal?

There won’t be any high school tournament season. There may be a Bruins playoff season and a Silver Knights regular season.

A year after all three levels of competition were going strong, we’ll take what we can get. Two out of three ain’t bad.

Tom King may be reached at 594-1251 or tking@nashuatelegraph.com. Also, follow King on Twitter (@Telegraph_TomK).

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