Toronto Maple Leafs Options For Playing the Rest of the Season

The Toronto Maple Leafs season has been paused, but when it will resume and in what way is anyone’s guess.

The Toronto Maple Leafs won’t be playing tonight, or any Saturday for the foreseeable future.

Reports that the NHL hoped to resume in two weeks seem insanely optimistic to me, but I guess a little optimism wouldn’t hurt at this point, so who knows?

In that best-case scenario, the season would likely pick up where it left it, but if not, what could happen?

Toronto Maple Leafs and the Rest of the NHL Season

If the pause to the season is longer than two weeks, say a month or so, they could probably schedule enough games to give each team a warm up, and to make it so that the teams had played an even amount of games.

Maybe this comes with best of five series instead of seven.

Or perhaps the NHL awards playoff spots based on points-percentage, and then decides to have a mini-training camp in place of finishing the rest of the season.

I am just guessing, obviously, but I think some variation of the above could work even if the season had to be paused until May.

If it goes that long, one solution could ultimately be to play into the summer and shorten and delay the start of next season in order to still award a Stanley Cup, and have an off season.

Then again, if you’re at the point where you’re messing with next season’s games, maybe it’s just better to cancel this season instead of resuming after some interminable delay with out-of-shape players and weird playoffs.  (Always assuming we can at least take it for granted that the NHL will eventually resume).

As of now, the world of professional sports doesn’t seem all that important, but then again, if I’m being honest, the world is a scary place right now and distractions are welcome.

Speaking of distractions, I can’t tell you how many times I automatically just went to grab my phone and check the scores, or how weird it was after dinner to automatically flip to a hockey channel before remember there was no games to watch.

One good thing we can take away from this “pause” of the season is that if the regular season does not continue, at least the Toronto Maple Leafs made the playoffs.

It didn’t look good for them at times this season, and it’s sort of ironic (given the way the season went) that they’ll start the playoffs as the same seed as they did last year, but they made it.

It may end up being on a technicality, but they made it.

So hopefully they get to play for the Stanley Cup, however weird or unusual the format.