from Bruce Garrioch of the Ottawa Sun,

The National Hockey League won’t return to action until it’s safe to come back.

Deputy commissioner Bill Daly told this newspaper in a telephone interview Tuesday that, while he remained hopeful the NHL would be able to finish its season and the Stanley Cup playoffs, that won’t happen until the league receives a green light from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control because of the world-wide spread of the novel coronavirus.

At this point, all options for trying to finish this season and award the Stanley Cup are on the table, but the league also doesn’t want to do anything that would negatively affect the start of next season. For now, the league can’t tell anybody what the future holds because commissioner Gary Bettman and Daly don’t have a crystal ball to answer that question for themselves, either.

It doesn’t sound as if the league will be back now before mid-May, if this season resumes at all, and nobody knows if that will leave enough time to finish the season and hold the playoffs. At this point, like everybody else, Bettman and Daly remain hopeful.

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