Chirps from Center Ice

If you followed it on Twitter Monday, they were on again, off again. At 5 p.m. Wilkes-Barre time on Monday, Springfield bought itself time.

AHL’s season pause will run out to May. Players are heading home.

Delaying until May buys the League about six weeks to come up with some type of contingency plan which still ultimately may end up in season cancellation. You still have 200+ regular season games left to play, plus playoffs. That is, unless you truncate what’s left of the season and either go straight into playoffs and come up with a format that runs a Calder Cup Final out to mid-June, best case.

It’s a bandaid on a bullet wound. The world as you know it has changed. If you haven’t been told to work from home yet, you will be, like I was on Monday. You are home from school and don’t know when you are going to go back. The last thing on anyones minds really should be when something as insignificant as sports are going to restart, let alone minor leagues.

Things can change and when they say that this situation with COVID-19 is fluid and literally changes every hour it’s true. Example, just last week I was still coming in to work and six of my colleagues volunteered to work from home due to this. Today, they scrapped those plans entirely and everyone was instructed to work from home. Maybe the worst of the pandemic happens in a week to ten days and we slowly work out of it and get the country and life as we all know it back online. But I just don’t see it happening, not when it comes to the resumption of play for the 2019-20 AHL season.

More, as it comes when it comes. Stay healthy.