What We've Been Watching In An Extra-Weird NHL Season
neil (Neil Paine, senior sportswriter): We're about 40 percent of the way through the 2021 NHL season now, and it's already had a lot of twists and turns -- both on and off the ice. To talk about those shifts, we're bringing together a bunch of people who love to watch and study hockey for our inaugural NHL Slack chat.
Today, I wanted to gather your first-half thoughts and also talk about what you're looking forward to as we approach the trade deadline in about a month. First, let's discuss the elephant in the room of this whole post-bubble NHL season: the impact of COVID-19 on the sport.
After a really tough early stretch where about a third of (non-Canadian) teams were shut down at one point or another, the league hit a better milestone earlier this week -- a season-low three players on the protocol list -- before getting another big reminder that things still aren't normal, when Sidney Crosby became the biggest star to join the list. (He's since left the protocol.)
So where do you all think things stand with the virus in the game now? Has the league gotten past the worst of it, and did its changes in policy last month have anything to do with that? And should we still be worried about something like Crosby's situation happening in the playoffs, where a...
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- A FiveThirtyEight Chat