Deputy Commissioner Bill Daly believes that the NHL will play out the entire season

With the seemingly endless wave of postponements that the NHL has had to deal with during this very strange season, there seems to be a pair of questions, burning in people's minds; will the NHL be able to complete its current season, or could we be looking at a similar fate to what it experienced last season?

Well, according to the NHL's Deputy Commissioner, Bill Daly, not only will the league be able to complete its 56-game season, but it will also be able to do so on time.

"We have postponed and had to reschedule 35 games. We've been able to do that fairly seamlessly," Daly told Greg Wyshynski and Emily Kaplan of ESPN. "I hope that the number of postponements and rescheduling goes down as we go forward, but we haven't even really eaten at all into the buffer period we built into the end of the schedule."

The goal from the beginning has been to have the regular season conclude in May, with the playoffs concluding on or around July 9th. Though Daly concedes that the exact dates may not be able to remain the same, he maintained that the league does have some flexibility.

"We've always said we want to be done by the middle of July," Daly said. "Whether that's July 10 or whether that's July 20, I couldn't tell you. As I sit here, we have some flexibility. But that's certainly the zone that we're targeting."

Proceeding with a season during a pandemic is not without its challenges, and though the NHL's level of success at controlling the potential exposure to COVID-19 isn't as high as it was during the 2019-20 postseason in the bubble, the league still has managed to contain the outbreaks with a reasonable level of success, especially when you consider how big the league really is.

"Quite frankly, we have a lot of players involved, right? We have a lot more than the NBA - around 725 players on active rosters plus taxi squad players plus AHL players. There are just a lot of players around," Daly said.

"Would I have hoped for less cases and fewer outbreaks among clubs? The answer to that is yes. Whether I can say it was a surprise to me, I'm not sure it necessarily is."

With reports confirming that the NHL may be able to begin vaccinating players in the next 4-6 weeks, it stands to reason that the number of positive test results will decrease, or even drop to zero ahead of the postseason. I suppose we'll just have to wait and see.

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