Asterisks?
If these 2020 NBA and NHL championships come with asterisks in the historical listings, they simply should be reminders of the unprecedented conditions.
They should not be diminishments of the accomplishments.
While the absence of relentless travel via plush chartered flights during the playoffs is a single-season exception, the champions this year more than ever will deserve parades.
Whether they’re for LeBron James and the Lakers or Kawhi Leonard and the Clippers in Los Angeles; for Giannis Antetokounmpo and the Bucks in Milwaukee; for Steven Stamkos and the Lightning in Tampa; for David Pastrnak and the Bruins in Boston; or for Nathan MacKinnon and the Avalanche in Denver.
If those parades are deemed possible.
With social distancing.
The NBA and NHL have not been playing under bubbles in hub cities for months.
It just seems like it.
So far, the quarantine-type conditions have worked, keeping COVID-19 at arms length through the NBA’s restart in Orlando and the NHL’s move right into an expanded playoff field in Edmonton and Toronto.
The NBA will open its conventional 16-team playoffs Monday and the NHL is just getting started in its first round after best-of-five Stanley Cup qualifiers pared down the bracket.
Now, this looks familiar.
Win four series, win 16 games, and the Larry O’Brien Trophy or the Stanley Cup is raised overhead. Both championships involve the most relentlentless physical and mental tests in professional sports’ postseasons. (Breaking it down further, the NHL gets the nod. The guy wearing the captain’s “C” and accepting the Stanley Cup from commissioner Gary Bettman — an inserted “boo!” there is mandatory playoff etiquette — often is so banged up, it’s a miracle he can get the trophy overhead.)
That’s under normal conditions.
Now, this is all happening with no real home court and no real home ice.
Hockey’s cognoscente — real or self-professed — try to make the concessions to the officially designated home teams into bigger advantages than they truly are.
That mainly involves having the last change, plus bench positioning and faceoff procedures.
The “better” team has earned the home-ice advantage in a seven-game series, so that skews numbers.
In both leagues, piped-in crowd noise and other bells and whistles tailored for the home team have combated the absence of fans. It’s more harmless and even in some cases more silly than it is effective in eradicating the studio feel.
The challenges now are different, including the bubble conditions.
The teams that advance to the Finals will end up being away from friends and family for months.
Then there’s this: Think of what it would be like for you to be quarantined with your co-workers for at least weeks … and maybe months.
A major challenge is to avoid getting sick of each other.
The teams that win these titles will have taken advantage of the conditions to add to roster-wide chemistry, to be the best team when it truly mattered, to get better.
As we’ve seen in the video and tales of life under the bubbles, the isolation is not a horrible existence. This is not any sort of attempt to label “heroic” those playing on while issues of so much more importance tied to COVID-19’s effects are in play nationally and internationally.
* It’s just different this year.
About Terry: Terry Frei is the author of seven books. His novels are Olympic Affair and The Witch’s Season, and among his five non-fiction works are Horns, Hogs, and Nixon Coming; Third Down and a War to Go; and ’77: Denver, the Broncos, and a Coming of Age. Information is available on his web site, terryfrei.com. His woodypaige.com archive can be found here.
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