COLUMBUS, Ohio -- Just doesn't sink in, does it?
I've had a couple days to process it, I've been right at the scene, and I'm still not close.
Spent a good part of Wednesday here watching the Penguins practice inside Nationwide Arena, laughing when Patric Hornqvist playfully pushed a net from one end of the rink to the other, filming for posterity the first Brandon Tanev goal I'd witnessed in forever, discussing with Brian Dumoulin what'd been missing from the D-zone breakouts ... basically, just business as usual.
Which, of course, nothing is right now.
Anywhere in our world, including our now seemingly smaller-than-ever sports world.
As of late Wednesday night, the NBA suspended its season shortly after one of its players, Rudy Gobert of the Utah Jazz, had contracted the novel coronavirus COVID-19. And then, Thursday morning, Major League Soccer and several other leagues suspended their seasons, capped by the NCAA scrapping March Madness.
And finally, befitting the glacial existence atop their respective structures, the NHL followed suit ...
The @NHL pauses 2019-20 season. https://t.co/WMePei4clH pic.twitter.com/W5Hqmk3kX7
— NHL Public Relations (@PR_NHL) March 12, 2020
.... as did Major League Baseball:
2020 Opening Day to be delayed by at least two weeks; Spring Training Games cancelled beginning today; and @WBCBaseball Qualifier games postponed indefinitely due to the national emergency created by the coronavirus pandemic. pic.twitter.com/yCgUHkdfpF
— MLB Communications (@MLB_PR) March 12, 2020
I mean, did anyone seriously see the NHL, one of those two that's in full swing, somehow skating through this?
Yeah, I know, it's the NHL, Gary Bettman, Colin Campbell, the whole dinosaur cluster ... but this is different. And with the NBA's swift, striking decision, the whole script changed. Because once a player would get afflicted -- any player, any league -- it had to.
Think of it this way: Gobert's Jazz just got done playing the Celtics, Knicks, Raptors and Pistons in the past 10 days. All four of those teams share arenas with NHL brethren in Boston, New York, Toronto and Detroit, respectively. Out of the past four road games the Jazz played, the Capitals, Hurricanes, Devils and Lightning all went on to use Utah's assigned locker room in that arena.
Get the picture?
If not, I'll leave it at this: The Capitals and Hurricanes just passed through PPG Paints Arena, and the Penguins were just banging bodies with the Devils out in Newark, all in the past five days.
It had to get shut down. Bettman couldn't afford to be the commissioner who allowed it to spread through his league. Don Fehr couldn't be the union chief who didn't protect his players. And the players themselves wouldn't want to be the ones spreading to a loved one, particularly if they're elderly and at higher risk.
It absolutely, positively had to get shut down.
OK, so what now?
Being blunt, stopping the games, for however long, is the easiest call. The infinitely greater challenge will be, as I'd written earlier Wednesday, working toward identifying an end game, some sort of all-clear signal that would allow sports -- and, ideally, life and everything else -- to continue as before. To reiterate from that column, it'd be unthinkable to wait out a vaccine, which experts attest will take more than a year to develop. And it'd be even more unthinkable to wait out anything approaching eradication.
Which leaves me with the same question I'm guessing most are asking: How long?
And in what form?
I don't worry about the NBA since we don't have a franchise, but their problems are likely similar to the NHL's:
• The NHL's got to round out the final dozen or so games on most teams' regular-season schedules before even thinking about starting the Stanley Cup playoffs, as there's no other way to choose who partakes. In the East alone, the teams holding the Nos. 6-11 spots are currently separated by three measly points. Freezing the standings and proceeding straight to playoffs would be terribly unfair.
• If playoffs are pushed back a month or two, they're blowing the annual calendar to bits. Meaning the draft, free agency, the players' labor-protected offseason, even the following training camp. And the playoffs alone, remember, take up two full months.
• If playoffs are pushed back even a week or two, they're blowing up the summer calendar of events at their respective arenas. That's true in both the NBA and NHL, of course. These aren't football and baseball stadiums sitting there idle the rest of the year. Most of them, including PPG Paints Arena, are utilized for concerts, shows and other events 320-plus days of the year, most heavily in the summer.
• But hey, Jake Guentzel could be back!
Baseball's got its own strains:
• Isolating first on our franchise: Although there've been some stated differences between indoor and outdoor settings on spreading COVID-19, any enclosed area would present at least some additional risk. So, the Pirates, who'd been set to open their season March 26 against the Rays in St. Petersburg, Fla., home to the fully enclosed Tropicana Field amid the oldest population in America in Pinellas County, was never going to happen. But even now, I can't help but wonder if such settings won't be a factor moving forward with one of the revised schedules MLB acknowledged in its release as being considered.
• The regular season had been set to end Sept. 27, a week earlier than usual, because of the leap year. But a week won't mean a whit where this seems to be headed. The schedule would need to be shortened, maybe significantly, and that would necessitate a redo in order to maintain competitive balance. It couldn't be simply cutting off whatever get canceled at the front end.
• Unlike the NHL, there can't be any pushing back of the playoffs. Those already dip into November anymore, and it's just too cold to continue past that without making the games a long-sleeved, mask-wearing farce.
The Pirates' players sounded resigned to a colossal change Thursday morning, per the reporting of our Alex Stumpf in Bradenton, Fla., this before taking the field for a Grapefruit League exhibition that wound up being their last of 2020.
Colleges are another category, one that's got little in common with the pros. Athletic schedules are aligned with academic ones. And while the timing might seem OK with basketball's regular season done, football part of the way through spring practices and not much left ... March Madness getting wiped out is crushing. The Tournament last year brought $933 million in ad revenue.
And then I've got another question altogether: Who gets hurt?
Fretting over schedules and the like will make for good sports conversation, but the damage that'll be done is hardly some casual inconvenience. TV and radio networks will want reparations for having no programming or less of it. Seats, concessions, parking and all the other stadium-arena revenue will be impossible to recoup, and that's to say nothing of having to pay out refunds right away. The little guys will be hurt, as well, from vendors to ushers to other workers, and to businesses around stadiums and arenas that rely on those places' customers for their own.
That part's unthinkable. Really is.
What will the Penguins and/or Pirates do to take care of those people, in the spirit of how Mark Cuban vowed to do so in Dallas for employees at American Airlines Center there?
In response to a question about how this news impacted his team, Mark Cuban considered how it impacts hourly workers and said they'll "put together a program for them." pic.twitter.com/jhAtDnZAcz
— ESPN (@espn) March 12, 2020
As I said, I'm having a hard time even beginning to wrap my head around this.
Better to just watch that Tanev goal on endless loop:
