NEW YORK — The NHL and NHLPA announced Tuesday night the league will target a Jan. 1 start date for the 2020-21 season.
The two parties said that they're still working to determine when training camp will start, which "will be communicated at a later date."
In July, the league and the NHLPA came together to work out a bubble system located in Canada to host a playoff following the postponement of the season during the start of the coronavirus pandemic.
From CBS Sports in late September:
"The NHLPA is in the process of creating a committee to help them answer the countless questions that currently loom regarding next season. They have to determine when the next season will start (Fehr and NHL commissioner Gary Bettman have said Dec. 1 is the earliest start date), how many games they can schedule and what protocols will be in place.
"Letting fans attend games is one of the biggest questions that has to be answered, mostly for financial reasons."
An NHLPA representative told the Associated Press that they won't be considering a bubble format again, at least for the regular season.
"Certainly not for a season, of course not," NHLPA executive director Don Fehr said. "Nobody is going to do that for four months or six months or something like that. Whether we could create some protected environments that people would be tested and they'd be clean when they came in and lasted for some substantially shorter period of time with people cycling in and out is one of the things I suspect we will examine."
The 2019-2020 season concluded Sept. 28 when the Tampa Bay Lightning clinched the Stanley Cup over the Dallas Stars.
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