Chirps from Center Ice

Thursday afternoon after a Board of Governors call which wrapped up around 3:30 p.m. Wilkes-Barre time, the American Hockey League announced that they have suspended the 2019-2020 season indefinitely due to concerns surrounding the COVID-19 (Corona) virus.

The statement from Springfield reads as follows…

Here is the official statement from Coal Street:

Expand to see the whole statement in its entirety.

Some teams were getting out ahead of the virus and cancelling player appearances, some arenas were taking precautions adding extra hand sanitizer stations and some were even considering playing behind closed doors with no fans in attendance.

The NBA, Major League Soccer, the NHL, MLB and even some college leagues had all previously announced pauses or suspensions to their seasons. In MLS it’s 30 days, baseball is paused for two weeks. Everywhere else there isn’t a timetable.

There are a little over 200 regular season games left in the AHL. The regular season was set to end on Saturday, April 11. Frankly I don’t see how you are going to wedge the remaining month of games (Wilkes-Barre has 13 games left in the regular season) into a window of the middle of April to say the start of or middle of May. Playoffs, for as long as they go (Calder Cup Finals wrap in mid-June in some years) you are looking at the middle of July if you are to play all the games and hold a standard playoff series.

That’s on the assumption that this virus is contained to a point to where you aren’t cancelling sports.

That’s also on the assumption that teams can even reschedule regular season games in buildings where they aren’t the primary tenant of said buildings. A Tuesday at 1 p.m. start in late April? A 10 a.m. Saturday game because of a concert later that night in early June?

On top of that, what’s the quality of play going to be like playing on an ice surface when it’s 80 degrees outside in some areas? You are attempting to play a winter sport in the summertime.

No, thank you.

It’s a developing situation, one that changes every hour it seems, but my best suggestion is to simply cancel the remainder of the regular season and who ever is top four in their respective divisions (the Penguins are not one of the teams, currently) make playoffs, whenever playoffs start, if you can even get the season going again.

Stay tuned, I guess, but we all just were handed a lot of free time for the foreseeable future.