TORONTO — Auston Matthews walked up to the podium and said: “This is different.”
John Tavares fielded questions from a safe distance and didn’t once place his hands on the plastic dais.
Jason Spezza joked that it felt like the playoffs.
If only that were the reason behind the unusual feeling in the air as the Toronto Maple Leafs returned to work at Scotiabank Arena amid a growing coronavirus crisis. That meant a new media protocol — with reporters kept out of the locker-room and players speaking in a press conference setting — and also raised impossible-to-suppress thoughts about where this could be heading next.
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You’d have to be living in a bubble to ignore the giant blinking warning lights here.
They’ve already cancelled the IIHF Women’s World Hockey Championship in Nova Scotia. And indefinitely postponed the Indian Wells tennis tournament in California. And delayed the start of the playoffs in Switzerland’s top hockey league. And halted every sporting event scheduled in Italy through April 3. And put off the start of the Nippon Professional Baseball season in Japan.
And, and, and.
In the wider context of how COVID-19 is impacting the sporting world, its impact on the Maple Leafs is but a speck of sand in the hourglass. But even for players with no unique insight into how the NHL might react to the rapidly spreading virus, there has to be some concern about the possibility it impacts the Stanley Cup Playoffs.
“You try not to let your mind wander too far,” said Spezza. “I think there’s empty stadiums where they’re still playing the games. I think as players we still want to play games and we’ll see where this goes, but at this point we’re not at that stage.
“So there’s no point in letting your mind wander or being scared of something that you don’t know is going to happen or not happen.”
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Still, the steady drumbeat of the season has been interrupted by the unknown.
Anyone who spends significant time around a professional sports franchise comes to understand that life falls into patterns and routines — even things like where and how media availabilities are conducted.
“We’ve talked about it, obviously,” said Matthews, of coronavirus. “It seems to be quite the subject now.”
It certainly seemed to overshadow what should be a big game Tuesday against the Tampa Bay Lightning — the team Toronto is most likely to face in the first round of the playoffs, assuming the Leafs qualify and NHL business continues on as normal.
The fact Morgan Rielly will return from eight weeks off with a broken foot, or that Matthews and Mitch Marner have been placed on different forward lines for the first time since Dec. 21, didn’t pop as storylines to the degree they normally would.
The Leafs largely read from the same songbook when it came to questions on coronavirus.
They are merely players putting faith in the capable medical professionals around them, going with the company line, and that’s all they can really do. But they are also 160 days into a regular season that could soon see them playing the most important games of the year in front of empty arenas, which can’t sit too well.
“It’d be obviously much different,” said Matthews. “Fans are obviously a huge part of the game, so that wouldn’t be too fun.”
“It would be a bit weird,” said Marner. “It’s something that, I don’t even think growing up you’ve never played in an empty stadium or an empty arena. You always had parents or somewhere there to watch. It would be interesting, for sure. I don’t think home ice advantage or anything would really be a benefit.
“We’ll see what happens — we’ll see what the league says — and go from there.”
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Playing in front of empty arenas is among the contingencies the NHL has already put in place, as reported Saturday during “Headlines” on Hockey Night in Canada. As are potentially using neutral sites or pushing games back later into April, depending on how and where the virus spreads.
The NBA’s board of governors will hold a Wednesday afternoon conference call to discuss next steps for its league, according to an ESPN report that also says there are escalating concerns about the need for games played “with only essential personnel in arenas.”
Should that happen, it’s hard to imagine the NHL doing anything differently.
The Leafs don’t want to spend much time thinking about that possibility.
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“I think no question you want to play with people in the building,” said Tavares. “There’s a lot of circumstances that go into it. I hate playing the ‘what if?’ game because I truly believe in hoping we don’t get to that point, but I think it’s obviously a big part of the game playing in the buildings we play in with people that can watch us play.”
In the meantime, they’ll focus on trying to do their jobs.
The Leafs are returning home from an 0-2-1 run through California where they scored only four goals and missed out on the chance to build up a nice playoff cushion over Florida. Even with coronavirus shifting the sand under their feet, there’s other places to put their energy.
“We still worry about the wins and losses more than the big picture, but yeah, I think it does show that there’s serious things happening and we don’t know about them,” said Spezza. “I think that’s the worrisome part, is that we don’t know.
“We’re just athletes.”
