The NHL season is suspended indefinitely due to the COVID-19 outbreak, and while the league hopes it will eventually be able to resume and conclude the 2019-20 campaign, that's far from a foregone conclusion. We're breaking down some of the major storylines that hang in the balance.

Before hockey was halted, the Colorado Avalanche were enjoying their best season in many years. The Edmonton Oilers, led by Hart Trophy favorite Leon Draisaitl and a certain superstar running mate, looked primed to start delivering on the promise of the Connor McDavid era. Anything can happen in the playoffs, which served as a rallying cry for the nine teams occupying a wild-card spot or within a few points of one.

Plenty of squads stand to begrudge what could have been if the regular season must be truncated or the playoffs can't be held at all. But no team's what-if scenario would sting quite like that of the Philadelphia Flyers.

Philly is a low-key tortured franchise, overshadowed in its division by the teams that employ Alex Ovechkin and Sidney Crosby and narrowly eclipsed in historical plight by, to pick one glaring example, the Toronto Maple Leafs. At 43 seasons and counting, the Flyers own the NHL's fourth-longest championship drought, and this sure wasn't supposed to be the year that the Stanley Cup returned to the City of Brotherly Love.

Non-rebuilding teams that miss the playoffs by 16 points - and are mercurial to the point of rattling off eight-game winning and losing streaks in the same season - don't tend to inspire high expectations when they ice much of the same roster the following season. After stumbling to that fate in 2018-19, Philadelphia's turnaround was among the better storylines of this paused campaign. Conservatively, they were set to enter the playoffs as a sensible dark-horse pick.

Hockey Reference's Simple Rating System, a metric that quantifies how good a team is based on its goal differential and strength of schedule, pegs Philadelphia as the NHL's fourth-best club through the suspension of play, behind only the Boston Bruins, the Tampa Bay Lightning, and Colorado. The Flyers started to round into truly fearsome form at an optimal time, winning nine straight games from Feb. 18 to March 7 and outscoring opponents 39-17 over that span.

The Flyers did make a few notable offseason changes. They hired Alain Vigneault as head coach. They traded for Matt Niskanen and Kevin Hayes (then signed the latter to a seven-year deal). From the start of the season, they entrusted Carter Hart, the league's youngest No. 1 goalie, with the task of stabilizing a perpetually troublesome position. (Seriously, this list isn't too pretty.)

Those moves were uniformly positive, and internal growth and resurgence took care of the rest. Travis Konecny, a first-round pick in 2015, is looking like a budding star. Offense came from many sources, from top-six mainstays Sean Couturier, Jakub Voracek, and Claude Giroux to an Ivan Provorov-led blue-line corps that combined to score 44 goals, one of the NHL's best such marks.

Fortified defensive play was paramount in the Flyers' rise: They're eighth in the league in goals allowed (191) a season after finishing 29th (280). They pace the NHL in home wins (25) and wins by three goals or more (21). All of this occurred without Nolan Patrick, the No. 2 pick in 2017, who's been sidelined since training camp due to a migraine disorder. (Philadelphia was also playing without Oskar Lindblom, the 23-year-old forward who was diagnosed in December with Ewing's sarcoma, a rare form of bone cancer.)

With the Flyers just one point behind Washington for the first seed in the Metropolitan Division, they seemed ready to rectify their generally underwhelming last decade of hockey. A refresher on recent club history: After barely making the playoffs and then surging, rather surprisingly, to the Cup final in 2009-10, Philly's next two teams were much stronger but bowed out in consecutive second rounds. Three postseason trips since have produced no series victories.

Rather than head into the playoffs on a tear, these Flyers may be left to wonder if this year's returns are repeatable. Konecny, Couturier, Voracek, Giroux, Hayes, and Provorov are all signed through at least 2022, but their contracts have Philly close to the cap. Meanwhile, Ovechkin and Crosby's enduring stardom and the ascent of the Bruins and Lightning to juggernaut status emphasize how strong the top of the Eastern Conference has become.

But again, anything can happen in the playoffs, as those plucky 2010 Flyers, whose Cup dreams were finally dashed by Patrick Kane's great vanishing goal, can attest. When will they get to try to make good on that hopeful adage again?

Nick Faris is a features writer at theScore.

Copyright © 2020 Score Media Ventures Inc. All rights reserved. Certain content reproduced under license.

The NHL season is suspended indefinitely due to the COVID-19 outbreak, and while the league hopes it will eventually be able to resume and conclude the 2019-20 campaign, that's far from a foregone conclusion. This week and next, we're breaking down some of the major storylines that hang in the balance.

With hockey in limbo, spare a quick thought for David Pastrnak and Auston Matthews, young dynamos and Atlantic Division foes who stood a realistic chance to accomplish what, judging by the NHL's entire post-lockout history, is usually unthinkable. Either could have pried the Rocket Richard Trophy away from Alex Ovechkin.

Matthews had scored 47 goals when the season stalled, already a significant career high for the 22-year-old Maple Leafs sniper. Pastrnak, a year older and a goal ahead in the race, was tied atop the league leaderboard with Ovechkin, who, it should be emphasized, wins this award with something resembling death-and-taxes certainty. He has topped the NHL in goals in six of the past seven seasons, and eight times in all.

The Capitals captain is inexorable, which is why Pastrnak and Matthews might bemoan this possibly lost opportunity to break his stranglehold - and why, if the rest of the regular season has to be nixed as part of the effort to repress the coronavirus in North America, fans might still nurse hope that Ovechkin has another such virtuosic year or three left in him.

It's inexact to characterize Ovechkin's age-34 season as a throwback performance, since he approximates this level of output almost every year. The 68 games he got in before the lull took hold were special. 2019-20 gave rise to the hottest scoring stretch of his career. Marvel at what Ovechkin did over seven consecutives games from Jan. 13 to Feb. 4, broken up by All-Star Weekend and the one-game suspension with which he was tagged for sitting out that extravaganza.

That's three hat tricks and 14 goals in all, which helped him close in on 700 for his career. Ovechkin reached that milestone in New Jersey on Feb. 22; he pinged a slap shot from the right circle off the far post and in, clearing the Washington bench and eliciting the rare standing ovation a player ever gets to bask in on the road.

When the season paused with 13 Capitals games remaining, Ovechkin's career goals tally was 706 - eighth in the all-time rankings. That's two goals fewer than Mike Gartner, 11 behind Phil Esposito, 95 back of Gordie Howe, and 188 away from Wayne Gretzky's famous benchmark of 894.

Here, we arrive at the rub. If expediency motivates the NHL to skip straight to the playoffs weeks or months from now, or if play is only able to resume in time for 2020-21, the hockey world won't get to watch Ovechkin's presumptive heirs strive to outscore him over the season's final stretch. Those circumstances would also complicate Ovechkin's pursuit of Gretzky's record.

Because small samples engender haphazard results, there's no way to be sure how Ovechkin would have produced over his club's last 13 games. Maybe he slumps as the likes of the Blues, Penguins, and Oilers limit him to a measly few goals. Maybe he feasts against the Senators, Sabres, and Red Wings (twice) and surges close to 60 goals for the season. The point is this: when a mark unattainable to everyone else who's ever laced up skates is up for grabs - and when brilliance is within the record-seeker's reach on any given night - every available shift has the potential to matter.

At the risk of reducing something joyous to an elementary math lesson, we can consider Ovechkin's scoring rate over the years to get a sense of the pace he'll have to maintain from here to catch Gretzky. To wit: he has averaged 0.70 goals per game this season, 0.64 per game over the past three seasons, and 0.61 per game for his career. At those rates, he'd require 269, 294, and 308 games, respectively, to bag 188 more goals.

Across all examples, that's somewhere between three and four full 82-game seasons, a ballpark range that sets parameters for the defining challenge of Ovechkin's twilight years. Can he stay healthy and light lamps with familiar frequency into his late 30s? Can he hang around long enough to nip Gretzky at the line?

Another hypothetical: Ovechkin retires with, say, 890 goals, just far back enough of Gretzky to argue and lament that all the time he was denied over the years - the full 2004-05 and partial 2012-13 lockouts; these 13 games at the crest of his powers - constituted causation. To the extent that sports are meaningful in the context of a pandemic, that would be a big shame. Maybe that prospect simply isn't worth sweating, though, so long as he comes back strong once hockey returns.

A couple of months ago, in an interview for a story about Ovechkin's ascent to 700 goals, Capitals TV color analyst Craig Laughlin said he thought some people were overly fixated on what he called "the next but" - whether Ovechkin will eventually surpass Gretzky - at the risk of failing to properly appreciate what he was in the process of doing. Ovechkin was sitting on 692 goals that day, but Laughlin's thinking seems just as resonant at a time when he's unable to play.

"Scoring 700 is something really, really, really special," Laughlin said. "Yeah, we should talk about Gretzky's number, and that he's 202 away. But let's take in this moment. Let's take in goal No. 700, because every single milestone along the way for Ovi has been remarkable in its own right."

Nick Faris is a features writer at theScore.

Copyright © 2020 Score Media Ventures Inc. All rights reserved. Certain content reproduced under license.

Editor's note: This piece was originally published in April 2019.

As spring bloomed in Seattle 100 years ago, Frank Foyston, the leading scorer on a team one game away from winning the Stanley Cup, received a letter from an inmate at a nearby U.S. military prison.

"Tell 'Happy' to board up the old tent, everybody shoot hard, and the Mets will cop the old championship," the note read.

Foyston's correspondent was a 28-year-old Canadian named Bernie Morris who'd been clinging for weeks to the hope that he, too, would get the chance to play in hockey's title series. Two years earlier, Morris had starred at center for the Seattle Metropolitans in the Stanley Cup Final. He scored 14 goals in four games as his squad rolled by the mighty Montreal Canadiens and became the first American franchise to win the trophy in the 25 years it had been awarded.

Had Morris been in the Metropolitans' lineup in March 1919, when they faced the Canadiens in a slightly belated rematch, his prediction that Seattle would soon fete another champion might have been regarded as obvious. Three of his Mets teammates were future Hall of Famers, including Foyston and goaltender Hap (or "Happy") Holmes. And by virtue of vying for the Cup in an odd-numbered year, Seattle got to host the whole best-of-five series, a quirk of the sport's scheduling patterns at the time.

But as the Canadiens journeyed across the continent by railcar, intent on securing redemption after their trouncing in 1917, Morris found himself stuck in Camp Lewis - a U.S. Army base where newly mobilized soldiers had been trained to fight in World War I, and where he now sat confined on a charge of dodging the draft.

"Morris … writes that he is with the team in spirit if not in person," the Seattle Post-Intelligencer newspaper reported at the time, summarizing the rest of his message to Foyston.

More than any other playoff held so long ago, people remember the 1919 Stanley Cup Final because of the calamitous circumstances that brought it to an early end. A historically deadly influenza pandemic thwarted the proceedings before a champion could be crowned; the deciding game was canceled when five Montreal players were bedridden with the flu. One of them, rugged defenseman Joe Hall, died from the effects of the illness at the age of 37. "SERIES NOT COMPLETED" was eventually carved into the Cup.

But fewer people remember the extraordinary chain of events that led to the final's cancellation. It might be the wildest hockey series ever staged, not least because one of its principal characters spent it desperately, and unsuccessfully, trying to avoid being shipped to Alcatraz.

Frank Patrick, the president of the Pacific Coast Hockey Association, had never witnessed a stranger combination of scenes. On April 1, 1919, the day the last game was called off, he said the final had been "the most peculiar series in the history of the sport."

In the first week of March 1919, when U.S. military officials apprehended Morris in Seattle, they let him play one game before they took him into custody: the last matchup of the Metropolitans' PCHA regular season. After Seattle beat the visiting Victoria Aristocrats 3-1, he was whisked away to plead his case.

Morris, a Manitoba native who lived in Seattle during the three-month PCHA season and worked at a remote site in the British Columbia woods for most of the year, had won an exemption from the U.S. draft - until, that is, his status changed and he was conscripted for service Nov. 5, 1918, six days before the end of the war.

Living so far off the grid at the time he was drafted, Morris contended that he'd never been notified of his call to duty. He and Seattle coach Pete Muldoon figured it wouldn't take long for the misunderstanding to be clarified. The shorthanded Metropolitans didn't stumble in the meantime: A week after his arrest, they outscored the Vancouver Millionaires 7-5 in a two-leg playoff to win the PCHA title.

Seattle's reward was a best-of-five showdown for the Stanley Cup with the Canadiens, who'd bested the Ottawa Senators to clinch the NHL championship. The 1918-19 season, the NHL's second in existence, had been rocky. The nascent league's only other team, the Toronto Arenas, had folded suddenly in February with two games left on the schedule. A couple of months before the season began, Ottawa player Hamby Shore had succumbed to pneumonia brought on by the influenza virus.

The Canadiens hoped to finish the year on a high note. To accomplish that feat on the road against steep odds, they would rely on their own stars. Legendary player-coach Newsy Lalonde had fileted Ottawa for 11 goals in five games in the NHL final. Didier Pitre was a potent scorer who went on to make the Hall of Fame. In goal was beloved veteran Georges Vezina, whose netminding prowess later inspired the namesake award after his death at 39 from tuberculosis. All three players were party to Seattle's resounding Cup victory in 1917.

"The crack Eastern team felt keenly their beating at the hands of the Seattle men several seasons ago," Post-Intelligencer reporter Royal Brougham wrote in a series preview on March 16, 1919, "and a few days ago (Canadiens manager George Kennedy) sent word ahead that he hoped Seattle would win the playoff, as his players were praying for another crack at the Mets."

Game 1, held at Seattle Ice Arena on March 19, proved a rude reawakening: The Metropolitans dusted Montreal 7-0 on the strength of a Foyston hat trick. Kennedy had praised the Mets' speed on the eve of the series, and Seattle's forwards, true to form, had broken through for umpteen clear shots on Vezina. The Canadiens seemed flummoxed by the PCHA rules under which the game was played, namely the fact each team iced a sixth skater - a rover - and was permitted to pass the puck forward in the neutral zone.

A few days later, Kennedy offered two novel excuses for his team's struggles: they were bothered by Seattle's "warm climate," with temperatures exceeding 50 F (10 C) during the day, and they weren't accustomed to walking on "cement sidewalks" in late March, as opposed to Montreal's soft, snow-covered walkways.

Nevertheless, the Canadiens evened the series with a 4-2 win played under NHL rules. Lalonde netted the first four goals of Game 2, upping his total for the postseason to 15, and Montreal withstood a stirring sequence midway through the third period in which Seattle scored twice within eight seconds.

As Kennedy bemoaned the off-ice conditions, the Mets learned after Game 2 that Morris would be detained at Camp Lewis for several more weeks, ruling him out of the series. Their disappointment was tempered when Foyston, with Game 3 operating under PCHA rules, recorded a first-period hat trick and later beat Vezina for a fourth goal in a 7-2 Seattle victory. (Postgame, the Canadiens got dismal news of a different kind: an amphitheater where Kennedy promoted wrestling matches had burned to the ground in Montreal.)

The absence of Morris, whose letter was delivered to Foyston after Game 3, meant Muldoon had only seven skaters at his disposal. The Mets never confronted a greater test of their stamina and willpower than Game 4 - "the hardest-played game in hockey history," Patrick said after the final whistle.

After combining for 22 goals through the first three games, neither team scored on the night of March 26. The brilliance of Vezina and Holmes forced the game to overtime. The run of play was even, and the pace unrelenting. Hall high-sticked Seattle forward Jack Walker for three stitches above his eye. Seattle thought it had scored at one point in regulation time, but the period had ended a second earlier. Mets enforcer Cully Wilson came within a hair of a game-winner early in OT; Lalonde almost ended matters for Montreal moments later.

"What a difference your leading scorer would have made in a tie game," Kevin Ticen, the author of a new book about the Metropolitans, told theScore in reference to Morris.

The contest ended without resolution after 80 minutes, at which point several exhausted players promptly keeled to the ice. Wilson had nearly fainted with a few minutes left on the clock. The following day, Seattle commissioned an osteopath to care for a severe strain in Foyston's thigh. Several of his teammates stayed in bed until well into the afternoon.

As the weary recuperated, officials decreed that Game 5 would be played under NHL rules, in effect serving as a replay of Game 4 - and that no Stanley Cup game would ever finish in a tie again.

The condition of Foyston's leg had improved by March 29, and when Seattle took a 3-0 lead into the second intermission of Game 5, it appeared his team's fleetness of foot would nullify any rules advantage Montreal should have enjoyed. But in the third period the Mets' fitness failed them, and the Canadiens, skating furiously, rallied to make it 3-3 on an Odie Cleghorn goal and two remarkable solo efforts from Lalonde.

Fifteen minutes into overtime, as Foyston lay flat on the Seattle bench after aggravating his thigh, one of Walker's skates broke and Wilson, utterly drained, chose that moment to beckon for a substitute. Before he could be replaced, one of Montreal's reserve forwards, Jack McDonald, gained possession of the puck, circumnavigated the Seattle defense, and scored the goal that tied the series.

Kennedy, who'd sent McDonald onto the ice amid the confusion in the Mets' ranks, was all smiles as he spoke to reporters. His team had erased its three-goal deficit without Hall, who'd become sluggish and left for the dressing room in the second period. Now one game remained to settle the title.

"I always claimed I had a game team, and the boys certainly proved it tonight," Kennedy said. "I expect them to win the championship now."

Kennedy and his club never got the chance. By the end of Game 5, the misery the series inflicted on all of its participants was plainly evident. Doctors determined that Foyston had torn a tendon. Seattle blue-liner Roy Rickey was 10 pounds lighter after playing 155 consecutive minutes over two overtime-prolonged games. His defense partner, Bobby Rowe, could barely stand on his bum ankle, the result of a hack from Hall several nights earlier.

The Canadiens' plight was cause for greater concern. Hall and McDonald awoke with high fevers the morning after Game 5. Kennedy, Lalonde, defenseman Billy Coutu, and left winger Louis Berlinguette were all confined to bed at Seattle's Georgian Hotel with illnesses of their own. By April 1, the day of Game 6, Hall and McDonald had to be rushed to hospital.

Even in his sickly state, Kennedy was set on icing a team for the conclusive game. He suggested he could wrangle reinforcements from the Victoria Aristocrats, Seattle's lowly PCHA opponent. Muldoon rejected the offer on the Mets' behalf, and Patrick insisted that he wouldn't compel Montreal to forfeit the Cup.

The circumstances, Patrick said, dictated that Game 6 couldn't be played that night or anytime soon. At noon on April 1, seven hours before puck drop, arena staff started removing the ice surface to make way for a summer roller rink, and by 2:30 p.m., officials confirmed what was already clear: The series was over.

"Not in the history of the Stanley Cup series has the world’s hockey championship been so beset with hard luck as this one has," read a dispatch in the Montreal Gazette and other newspapers on April 2, 1919.

"The great overtime games of the series have taxed the vitality of the players to such an extent that they are in poor condition indeed to fight off such a disease as influenza."

The observation was tragically prophetic. From 1918-20, the influenza strain that felled the Montrealers infected one-third of the global population and killed an estimated 50 million to 100 million people. Hockey historian Eric Zweig, whose children's novel "Fever Season" is based on the 1919 Cup final, said the pandemic could strike at terrifying speed: "You could be healthy when you went to bed, wake up in the morning feeling sick, be really sick by lunchtime, and be dead by dinnertime."

Reports of Hall's condition grew increasingly dire. On April 2, his fever was said to have reached 103 F (39.4 C). The next day, he contracted pneumonia. By April 4, each ailing Canadiens player was feeling better, except for him. He died at 2:30 p.m. on April 5.

Newspaper obituaries recounted his life story to mournful readers. Hall was born in England in 1881 and grew up in Brandon, Manitoba. He won Stanley Cups with the Quebec Bulldogs in 1912 and 1913 and joined the Canadiens in 1917. "Hall was a star of the first magnitude when many of the young players on his team were infants," the Post-Intelligencer wrote. The Toronto World called his two-decade career "long and checkered," but noted that despite his trademark aggression, he made friends wherever he played.

"I cannot tell you how deeply grieved I am to hear of Hall's death," said Frank Patrick's brother, Lester, whose long playing career ran parallel to Hall's. "Joe had a heart as big as a house and was a prince of good fellows."

Hall was buried in Vancouver on April 8 in the presence of his wife, Mary, and their three children. Lalonde and Berlinguette served as pallbearers, as did Lester Patrick. Lalonde departed on the long ride back to Montreal a few days later - but only after telling reporters that, had the last game of the final been played, the return to PCHA rules would have guaranteed Seattle the Cup.

The Metropolitans dispersed for the offseason. Wilson had accepted a job at Seattle's shipyards as soon as the series ended, while Walker undertook the same work back home in Ontario. Foyston, still hobbling on his injured leg, got married on the day after Hall's funeral with Holmes serving as best man. That summer, the Post-Intelligencer reported, the forward and the netminder planned to run a wheat ranch together.

A week after Hall's death, army officials at Camp Lewis decided where Bernie Morris would spend the offseason: the military prison on Alcatraz Island. Seattle's erstwhile star scorer was sentenced to two years of hard labor for desertion, a verdict Frank Patrick vowed he would help contest, if need be, all the way to the desk of U.S. President Woodrow Wilson.

In the end, Morris was imprisoned for a year before he was exonerated and released - just in time to suit up on the road against NHL champion Ottawa in the 1920 Stanley Cup Final. Rendered rusty by his lockup, Morris only contributed two assists all series, but Foyston scored six goals as the Mets won two of the first four games and pushed the Senators to a winner-take-all matchup for the title.

Seattle lost that game 6-1. Vancouver defeated the Mets in three of the next four PCHA finals, and the franchise folded in 1924, ensuring they'd never play for the Cup again.

Nick Faris is a features writer at theScore.

Copyright © 2020 Score Media Ventures Inc. All rights reserved. Certain content reproduced under license.

The women's world hockey championship in Nova Scotia has been postponed until next year. Tennis' prestigious Indian Wells event in California was scrapped on the eve of the tournament. Japanese baseball's Opening Day is delayed indefinitely. Marquee soccer matches across Europe are scheduled to be played in empty stadiums. In Italy, they've been canceled outright for at least the rest of March.

Over the past several days - as confirmed cases of COVID-19 exceeded 100,000 around the world - sports leagues and organizations have taken increasingly severe precautions to avoid intensifying the spread of the disease. Along with the examples above, no fans were present for Division III basketball tournament games in Baltimore last weekend and no spectators will attend the Olympic torch-lighting ceremony in Greece on Thursday. Pro soccer is on hold in Switzerland, South Korea, Japan, and China - close to the nexus of the outbreak and far beyond. The breadth of this response is unprecedented in history.

For the time being, numerous major events are still set to proceed as usual, from March Madness and the Masters over the next 30 days to Euro 2020 and the Tokyo Olympics this summer. The NBA, NHL, and MLB schedules are similarly untouched, but that may change as each league's defensive strategy evolves.

If any of these competitions are played in isolation or abandoned altogether, it will be further evidence that no crisis event has ever affected sports to this degree: not the influenza outbreak of a century ago, either world war, or any virus of recent origin.

"With how rapidly this infectious disease has spread globally to so many countries, it's just having such a greater impact than we've ever seen on sport before," U.K.-based sports historian Heather Dichter said.

Dichter is an associate professor of sport management at De Montfort University in Leicester, England, where she focuses her research on mega-events and international competition. In a conversation that's been condensed and edited for clarity, she spoke to theScore on Monday about the uptick in worldwide cancellations, the uniqueness of this ongoing mass response, and the ways in which our games could potentially change as a result.

theScore: All sorts of major events across the world are being canceled or played without fans in attendance. Does this kind of widespread global response in the sports world have any historical equivalent?

Dichter: Not to this global extent. With Ebola in Africa a few years ago, there was definitely an impact there with the Africa Cup of Nations being moved (out of Morocco) and some countries not wanting to have this influx of fans from Ebola-infected West African states. But that was really at a continental level.

I guess the only other, earlier precedent was the FIFA Women's World Cup in 2003, in China with SARS. (That tournament was moved to the U.S., while the women's world hockey championship, set to be held in Beijing, was canceled altogether.) That was still when China was really getting started with hosting international events in the lead-up to the Beijing Olympics. Since Beijing, they've been hosting a lot more international events, which is why the earliest events being canceled or moved were the events in China. As this disease has spread all around the globe, it hasn't been as limited geographically as previously.

I think where we'll see the impact and the change - and it'll be a bit more behind the scenes - there's going to be a lot more elements to public health that cities and governing bodies will take into consideration when it comes to locations bidding for events. Just looking at hockey and Nova Scotia and (the 2020 women's world championship) being postponed a year now, you are dealing with a single sport. You're dealing with one location, or two, and some practice areas. But the scale and scope of bidding for and planning for that event, it's still significant.

S: Lately, in general, it seems as though fewer cities have been bidding for or showing a willingness to host the Olympics. I think it's starting to be seen as somewhat of a burden even when there's no specter of a global disease spreading. This seems to be an additional complication or reason cities might cite in balking at hosting such major events.

D: They're going to have to consider those things. We haven't seen it yet with sport, but if somebody attends an event and we now have this mass spread of the coronavirus, or any future infectious disease, because of the sporting event - if that becomes a place where all of a sudden, thousands of people get infected in a single afternoon or (over) three days of a tournament - then I think you're going to hear even more of a backlash of locations not wanting to potentially host.

It's one thing that world championships for indoor athletics have been postponed a year, and women's ice hockey. Those federations - which are two of the biggest, wealthiest, most prominent international federations - they've said, "We're making our commitment to this location. You have spent the year planning and preparing for this. We're just going to move it a year." But places where events are being canceled, that's lost income, and that's not just for the sport itself. That's all of the elements related to the tourism industry. They may choose not to want to try to host an event again in the future.

S: How did the 1918 influenza pandemic affect the sports world? Do any elements of that response parallel at all what we're seeing today?

D: Sport was so different back then. Yes, we had international sport and global sport, but not to the extent that we do nowadays. If it did have an impact back then, it would have been very localized. The modern Olympics - although they were founded in 1896 - until 1912, they were really small. It wasn't like you were an athlete and you trained to go to the Olympics. 1912 is when we first started to see the Olympics kind of actually looking like modern Olympics, and then they didn't happen in 1916.

You didn't have many world championships back then. It was only a few international sports that did. In 1918, with the war having literally just ended, most of the federations weren't even looking to meet again until 1919. International sport was so disrupted by the war anyway that you didn't see this kind of (additional) impact on sport back then.

S: I'm interested in chatting about the risk-reward proposition that's inherent here. On one hand, there's the entertainment value sports provide in trying times, versus what probably should be the paramount concern: the possibility of people getting infected at events. I realize it's a different scenario, but MLB, minus many players who went off and served, still played during World War II. How have sports organizations weighed this risk-reward equation over the years, and what has it taken for them to cancel events outright?

D: It's a tough one. They all have to weigh whatever is happening in the world against what is needed. Obviously, there was that sense during (both) world wars coming from the White House of, "We need baseball to continue. This helps with morale in the country." But when 9/11 happened, all sports stopped for a week. That's why we now have the Super Bowl in February, because it got pushed back - they lost a week in September that year.

There's a difference between our professional sports, where the goal is to make money, versus sport at other levels, be it high school sport, youth grassroots sport. NCAA sport in the U.S. is, in theory, about social value, but we all know certain sports make a lot of money. The NCAA does not want to (cancel) its March Madness Final Four, because that's a huge cash cow for them, just like the IOC wants the Olympics to happen when they're supposed to happen, because of the sponsorship, the broadcasting rights. NBC has already announced they've made over $1.25 billion for, basically, commercials. They're going to reap in that cash because they've already shelled out billions for the right to broadcast the Olympics.

The badminton federation, they're not bringing in the money like the National Hockey League is. It's just the nature of the sport. Whatever's happening in the world factors differently to what these organizations are making decisions on.

S: Again, with the obvious caveat that keeping people healthy is the most important thing, there's an opportunity cost beyond money to the organizations themselves that athletes incur when events are canceled. Tennis players would lose out on their primary income stream if big events are scrapped. Top women's hockey players won't get to play in their marquee event this year. When events have been canceled in the past, to what degree have these sorts of concerns been considered?

D: It's not necessarily events (being) canceled. Think about Olympic boycotts, where other people are making decisions, not the athletes, as to attend. When it was the very political decision for the U.S. not to go compete in Moscow in 1980, and for other countries that also chose to boycott, those athletes were upset. They felt left out. For sports where the Olympics is the pinnacle - where you don't have an opportunity to be a professional rower, that kind of thing - that was their peak. They trained for that. The Olympics happen once every four years. World championships in the IAAF only happen every two years. To miss that, that might have been their one chance where they actually could have won.

When you think about professional athletes - tennis, absolutely. If tournaments aren't held, they're not going to win that money. Yes, some of them have sponsorship. For the very best ones - Federer, Djokovic, Serena Williams - they make more money on sponsorships than they do winning the tournament. But that's not to say what they're winning in tournaments is paltry. That is still income they've been planning for. For athletes who are lower down in the ranks, getting to the second or third round of a tournament actually does give them money they're desperately in need of to be able to maintain their career as a professional athlete.

S: What other lasting changes in sports might this global response to the coronavirus prompt?

D: I think it's hard to say. I think there will be greater contingency plans put into place. I do think we will start to see greater planning: bringing in more public health officials when it comes to places that are going ahead planning and hosting events.

Unfortunately, we're seeing more of these new infectious diseases. SARS was 17 years ago. Ebola, we saw the big outbreak six years ago. Zika was four years ago. If we're seeing more new infectious diseases, I mean, that's scary from a health standpoint anyways globally. But if we're seeing more - we're having new diseases coming around more frequently - I think that's going to have to be taken into consideration.

It's hard to plan for something that you don't know what it is. It's the same issue with catching athletes who dope. You can't have the detection until you actually know what the new drug is that they're taking. It's hard. Anti-doping is always playing catch-up to science and whoever is doping, and that's kind of, in some ways, how public health is with respect to these sporting events. But you can see what has happened. How can we prepare to prevent something similar?

Nick Faris is a features writer at theScore.

Copyright © 2020 Score Media Ventures Inc. All rights reserved. Certain content reproduced under license.

TORONTO - The Maple Leafs never retired jersey No. 9 for Dick Duff, so his headshot doesn't hang from the roof at Scotiabank Arena next to those of other beloved past stars. The omission is understandable: only two of the six Stanley Cups Duff won in the 1960s were with Toronto. The small but rugged winger charmed fans in archrival Montreal, too, over the latter half of his Hall of Fame career, securing his place in history as a vital member of the Original Six era's last great teams.

On a recent Saturday night, Duff's great-nephew Cody Goloubef sat in the press box at Toronto's rink - at eye level with the banners that honor many of Duff's contemporaries - and reflected on his own standing in the sport. For all but two weeks since he left college in 2010, his resume has been that of a scuffling pro on the fringe of the limelight. Goloubef's 311 AHL games are double what he's played in the NHL, where no club, including this season's Ottawa Senators, has afforded him a bigger role than depth defenseman.

But about those exceptional weeks, and the distinction that now sets him apart from the rest of his country. Two years on from the first Olympic men's hockey tournament in a generation that didn't feature NHLers, Goloubef is the only member of Canada's bronze-medal team who's returned to hockey's best league. Where most of his teammates went back to Europe, he parlayed his contract with Calgary's AHL affiliate into a series of one-year, two-way deals, the last of which allowed him to cinch a permanent roster spot with the rebuilding Sens.

In Gary Bettman's NHL, that means Goloubef, 30, has about as special, and as broadly significant, a story a seventh blue-liner could aspire to author. Unlike the top players in the world circa 2018, he got to live an adventure that he said his great-uncle Dick thought was pretty cool - and that Bettman, judging by the commissioner's public comments on the subject, appears ready to forgo once again.

"Anytime you get that kind of experience, that's something you'll never forget," Goloubef said. "Playing in the NHL is rare as is, but then getting a chance to play in the Olympics, no matter under what circumstance, is rare."

Memories of PyeongChang 2018, an event at which Germany upset Canada in the semifinals and Russia won gold while playing under the shroud of national doping sanctions, are worth revisiting as the second anniversary of the tournament arrives, and not only because of its unusual results. As the NHL season ticks toward the trade deadline, the league's also approaching an IIHF-imposed Aug. 31 cutoff date to decide whether its players will participate in the 2022 Beijing Olympics.

Bettman and IIHF president Rene Fasel have plenty of time to find harmony before that summer deadline. The NHL passed on Pyeongchang because of concerns over scheduling, injuries, and costs, but the IIHF and IOC have expressed their shared readiness to resolve the last of those sticking points. And the league's desire to make inroads in China - it held preseason games there in 2017 and 2018 and opened a satellite office in Beijing last year - may convince Bettman that committing to these particular Winter Games would be worthwhile.

Or maybe that fascination won’t persuade him, in which case the structure of a tournament that was novel to younger fans in 2018 - that temporarily elevated fill-ins like Goloubef to global prominence - could again become the Olympic norm.

The NHL seems at ease with the possibility. As deputy commissioner Bill Daly told the Associated Press by email this week, the league continues "to believe that the negatives (of attending the Olympics) outweigh the positives." Bettman hinted to reporters at All-Star weekend in St. Louis last month that he didn't feel compelled to adhere to Fasel's deadline. He also reiterated that the NHL was "very comfortable" with its decision to stay home from South Korea.

Even with the NHL's most recognizable faces out of the picture, many teams went to the 2018 Olympic men's tournament with inbuilt unity. Every member of the silver medallist Germans was drawn from the country's domestic league. Resident KHL powerhouses SKA Saint Petersburg and CSKA Moscow combined to supply all but two players in the Russian lineup.

Teams USA and Canada were mishmashes by comparison, made up of guys from as many as six pro leagues. Still, most of those players were on a parallel track: they'd been NHLers, either fleetingly or for long spans, slipped out of the roster cycle well before they planned to retire, and were now the best of the rest.

National federations will call upon this sort of player again in 2022 if the NHL skips Beijing. For the bulk of them, the tournament won't register as professionally consequential; they'll play solid hockey, gain indelible memories, and then return to secondary echelons of the game for good. Hardly a raw deal, especially given young stars Connor McDavid and Auston Matthews have never attended the party - and especially for the rare player who subsequently finds himself upwardly mobile.

Like Ryan Donato. The Wild forward, 23, led the U.S. in scoring at PyeongChang 2018 as one of three American players recruited from the NCAA.

Just as his career trajectory ran counter to those of his older Olympic teammates, so too did Donato have different obligations during the tournament. He had to devote an hour or two each night to sociology schoolwork he brought to Korea from Harvard, trying to write fast and cogently without depleting his mental energy for competition.

The U.S. slumped to a seventh-place finish, but Donato struck that proper balance. He remembers getting good grades that semester, and on the ice his five goals in as many games tied him for the tournament lead with Russia's Ilya Kovalchuk and Kirill Kaprizov. The experience also helped him grasp something essential about life in hockey: the talented players of the world far outnumber those who can fit in the NHL; ascendance to that stage is no guarantee you'll stick around.

"Seeing that there's a lot of good players who aren't in the NHL shows me how hard it is to actually stay," Donato said in a phone interview. "I took that very personally and try to (work) for that every day."

To those many players who'd already moved on from the NHL, the 2018 Olympics presented a chance to prove to viewers that they could put on a compelling show. Canadian defenseman Maxim Noreau wanted to challenge a pervasive misconception: that North Americans only go to play in Europe when they can't come close to hacking it at home. His career seemed to fit such a narrative. After making two AHL all-star teams, Noreau renounced the unsteadiness of the minors and moved at age 24 to Switzerland, where he's played seven of the past nine seasons.

"I played six (NHL) games, I came to Europe pretty early in my career, and a lot of people questioned if that was the right move or not," Noreau said. "I have no regrets. I'm very happy here. My family's very happy. We've been in Switzerland forever. But I think playing in a tournament like that - even going in and making the team - I wanted to show people that, hey, I'm a good player."

Noreau's seven points in Pyeongchang tied him for the Canadian scoring lead with 738-game NHLer Derek Roy, who took from the Olympics his own special recollections. Cut from the 2010 Canadian team that won gold in Vancouver, he came to appreciate in 2018 the competitiveness of every shift, the result of the effort he said every team summoned under magnified win-or-go-home pressure.

Roy's now playing in Germany, his fourth European country since he left the NHL in 2015. Some of his EHC Red Bull München teammates are also reigning Olympic silver medallists. They include goalie Danny aus den Birken and forwards Patrick Hager and Frank Mauer, all of them "super humble people," Roy said, who've refrained from gloating about their semifinal stunner.

"It's pretty funny to see some of the guys that you played against, and then they're on your team a year later," Roy said. "It's just crazy how the hockey world is."

After their unexpected turn as Olympians, do the 2018 alumni believe NHLers should return in 2022?

Donato said he might have answered differently when he was in college, but today straightforward logic - it's the best tournament in the world when the best participate - leads him to say yes. On the other hand, his breakout performance in Pyeongchang and his praise for the event's caliber attest that alternative setups can entertain, too.

"Only the elite of the elite can play in the NHL. A lot of those guys did," Donato said. "No matter what, when you're representing your country, every guy is going to bring their A-game."

Roy thinks Olympic hockey is captivating in any configuration, including the one where players who never reached NHL stardom get to command the attention of the world. They certainly value the chance: Roy's coach in Pyeongchang, Willie Desjardins, said no group of his ever has shown more excitement on the bench than Team Canada in 2018.

"I have a ton of respect, obviously, for the NHL players, and I think they do an incredible job," said Desjardins, who now coaches the Western Hockey League's Medicine Hat Tigers. "But for us, it was a great opportunity, and something I know every one of us will always remember."

Noreau said he sympathizes with viewers who'd rather watch, say, Drew Doughty compete on the global stage than him. But in 2018, such a decision wasn't his to make, so he and his teammates sought to control what they could by embracing the assignment before them.

"The NHL should be at the Olympics," Noreau said. "But if they aren't, then 100%, I want to be involved and I want to try to make (the 2022) team. Why would you not as a hockey player?"

Asked for his opinion on the NHL's Beijing question, Goloubef smiled and was noncommittal: "That's above my pay grade." He's similarly deferential in how he regards his unique path from Pyeongchang to the NHL - a defining detail of his time in the game, like Dick Duff's six Stanley Cups. It's a cool honor, Goloubef said, but one that didn't make sense for his teammates with established careers in Europe to pursue.

Any player entering free agency this summer would rightfully consider such a thought premature, but it's peculiar to think about the upshot of Goloubef's comeback: if he's in the NHL in two years, he won't be going to another Olympics no matter what Bettman decides. At the very least he'll have his memories from 2018: winning bronze, marvelling at Olympic mountain events, admiring the force with which short-track speed skaters turn, seeing medal hopes nurtured over the course of years pivot on the events of milliseconds or a single mistake.

"That's their life," Goloubef said. "To see somebody fall, or somebody win a gold (they're) probably not supposed to win, it's a pretty emotional time for people."

This season in Ottawa, the task at hand is to take strides toward winning against the weight of all outside expectations. The Senators won't come close to making the playoffs, but from his seat at banner level, Goloubef said he foresees a lot of the team's pieces panning out. The process takes time, he said. The prudent response is to follow a treasured hockey aphorism: just keep chipping away in hopes of getting to where you want to be.

"That's the way the league goes," Goloubef said. "There's ebbs and flows, and you've just got to stick with it every single day."

- With files from John Matisz

Nick Faris is a features writer at theScore.

Copyright © 2020 Score Media Ventures Inc. All rights reserved. Certain content reproduced under license.

The Washington Capitals had a full week off ahead of January's NHL All-Star Game, but Craig Laughlin remained in midseason form, gushing over the phone one morning during his break from the rink about the irresistible symbolism of Alex Ovechkin's greatest goal. You know the one: A Phoenix Coyotes defenseman knocks the Russian winger off balance in the slot in 2006, only for Ovi to corral the puck while falling onto his back before blindly flicking it - mostly with one hand - through the sliver between the goalie's outstretched stick and the post.

The play astounded on its merits alone. Then came the moment that, to the Capitals' veteran TV color analyst, elevated Ovechkin's contortion to a higher sphere of significance: Wayne Gretzky, the head coach of those Coyotes, gazing up at a replay on the arena video board, resigned to marveling helplessly from the bench.

"It just adds to the lore," Laughlin said. "The greatest goal-scorer of all time is looking at this and just saying, 'Wow.' To me, that says something about Alex's greatness."

For 15 seasons, Ovechkin's propensity to fool netminders has carried him ever higher on the NHL's all-time goals leaderboard, past a succession of Original Six legends and icons of later years, ever closer to the gold standard below whom they all sit. Past Jean Beliveau and Maurice Richard. Past Joe Sakic and Brendan Shanahan. Just since the calendar turned to 2020, he's passed Teemu Selanne, Mario Lemieux, Steve Yzerman, and Mark Messier.

Two constants have underpinned Ovechkin's ascent to eighth place in this corner of the record books. One is his own consistency. Never in a season has he scored fewer than 30 goals. He's reached or exceeded 50 eight times, good for third in league history behind Gretzky's and Mike Bossy's nine.

The other constant? Laughlin and play-by-play partner Joe Beninati at rafter level, the vantage point from which they've called nearly all of Ovechkin's steps toward the next momentous number he'll soon reach.

The Capitals captain enters Saturday's game against the Philadelphia Flyers with 698 career goals, well back of Gretzky's record total of 894 but merely an inspired flurry shy of 700; D.C. and the wider hockey world are set to fete his breakthrough. The Capitals, according to The Washington Post, plan to stage a tribute featuring video messages from teammates and an appearance from Ovechkin's son Sergei, who was born in 2018, a couple of months after his dad won the Stanley Cup.

When that celebration goes down, Beninati and Laughlin - the voices of the Capitals on NBC Sports Washington since 1996 - will be uniquely positioned to appreciate Ovechkin's accomplishment, as they are now to contemplate the totality of the legacy they've watched him compile.

"He's challenged my powers of description ever since he jumped into the game," Beninati told theScore. "There are things that he does at times that look like they're superhuman. He forces you as an announcer to be ready for something you may have never seen before."

Beninati and Laughlin were in the booth for Ovechkin's NHL debut against the Blue Jackets on Oct. 5, 2005, when the full-toothed newcomer from Moscow dislodged a stanchion behind the Columbus net on his first shift by ramming defenseman Radoslav Suchy into the boards. "This guy is the real deal," Laughlin thought to himself, even before Ovechkin scored on one-timers from the high slot and near the goalmouth later that night.

The duo watched Ovechkin retain and flex that combination of power, flair, and timing as the Capitals grew from league doormats to perennial playoff washouts to Cup champions. Laughlin thinks Ovechkin has evolved into one of history's most well-rounded scorers, a 236-pound winger whose footwork, shoulder fakes, backhand, and passing ability don't garner enough recognition in the shadow of his bruising shot.

"(People) think he's just this shooter," Laughlin said. "They don't see the fact he had to bust his butt to get past the defender. He had to then get away from a guy who's trying to clobber him. Then he had to get away from a stick that's trying to take away his stick. Then he gets open. Then he shoots.

"There's steps along the way that I don't think we give Alexander credit for when it comes to scoring goals. You need those steps. Without those steps, he's not going to be where he is now."

Ovechkin certainly gets fair credit for the spectacular ways in which he's deposited pucks in nets. Different highlights spring to mind in different conversations. Remember when he spun to beat Montreal's Roman Hamrlik to a loose puck, outraced Kyle Chipchura to the crease, and scored on Carey Price in mid-slide? Remember when, during the 2009 playoffs, he eluded one New York Ranger's check and stickhandled through another's legs - "Dazzling moves!" Beninati said at the time - before sprawling to beat Henrik Lundqvist with a backhand? Remember when he trumped Price again by juggling an airborne puck and banking it in off the goalie's backside? ("That is a thing of beauty," Laughlin remarked on air.)

One could never exhaustively catalog Ovechkin's handiwork from memory alone. For that purpose, NBC Sports Washington recently aired his regular-season goals in a single go - at the time, all 692 of them.

"I remember most of them," Beninati said. "I've been lucky."

Laughlin, a forward for Washington through the mid-1980s, was lucky in his own right back then. He'd park himself by the crease on the power play as defensemen Scott Stevens and Kevin Hatcher pounded shots from the point, more than a few of which, he said, would ricochet "off my ass and into the net." He also shared the ice with longtime Capitals star Mike Gartner, a hard-shooting, scorchingly fast right-winger whose 708 career goals make him the next legendary scorer Ovechkin is working to eclipse.

Gartner features in Laughlin's ideal conception of Ovechkin's 700th. Scoring from his back as a bright-eyed rookie in front of Gretzky? Poetry. So Laughlin figures it would be fitting if this next landmark goal materialized at Washington's Capital One Arena, where Ovechkin could celebrate beneath Gartner's retired No. 11.

Beninati's first hope for No. 700 is that he, Laughlin, and their production team actually get to work the game in question. He was standing in line outside of the arena on Jan. 11, 2017, when Ovechkin scored his 1,000th point in the first minute of an NBCSN national telecast. (NBC Sports Washington is scheduled to broadcast the Caps' next seven games.)

Fortune sided with Beninati and Laughlin on other marquee occasions. They were on the mic for Ovechkin's 400th goal, an anticlimactic empty-netter at Carolina, and his 500th, a top-shelf wrister on the power play at home against Ottawa. Beninati saw a photographer's camera light up and called that play on the fly: "In a flash! Welcome to the club!"

Fun as they are, potential milestone nights also roil the nerves, Beninati said, though he never tries to moderate his anticipation by scripting ideas of what to say. Much the opposite: Spontaneity and instinct are paramount. Two seasons ago, Beninati won a share of a local Emmy for his network's coverage of No. 600 by waiting patiently as Ovechkin whacked at the puck during a scramble against Winnipeg. Ovechkin's third shot attempt finally cleared the thicket of limbs.

"And then 'overpowering' just came out of my mind," Beninati recalled. "People had said this guy was slowing down. He's not slowing down. He's still going strong."

Now more than ever, it seems.

Ovechkin has three hat tricks in his last six games and an NHL-best 40 goals on the season. That blistering output has him on pace to progress from 600 to 700 goals in fewer games than even Gretzky. Another record beckons below the radar in his near future: Ovechkin is 16 power-play goals away from breaking Dave Andreychuk's all-time mark of 274.

What form his 700th goal will take is anyone's guess. As ever, Beninati won't prescribe his reaction in advance. But he will cop to hoping that a certain nightmare scenario - a net-front deflection that renders the scorer's identity unclear - doesn't come to pass.

"Did he get it? Did he not get it? Oh, God, what should I say?" Beninati said. "You want it to be a blast down the wing that goes in cleanly, where you see every piece of nylon in the net move."

Beninati and Laughlin like to banter on occasion during play. But once Ovechkin is sitting on 699 goals, the color analyst said he'll hew toward silence, joking that he'd risk a punch from Beninati if he were to talk over No. 700. That intention is characteristic of their whole approach to the task. Ovechkin's orchestration of history, the announcers say, ought to be about him. They'll be there to accentuate the moment, beginning with Beninati's call and Laughlin keeping quiet a little while longer.

"I want to let it breathe," Laughlin said. "I want to watch the fans' reaction. I want to hear the fans. I want to take in the moment - and then, when I do talk after it, to really put a bow and a ribbon around just what we saw."

Nick Faris is a features writer at theScore.

Copyright © 2020 Score Media Ventures Inc. All rights reserved. Certain content reproduced under license.

In TV, as in life, trying situations can occasionally be optimized by choosing to focus on the positive.

Jan. 1, 2018 was a frosty afternoon in New York City. Beers froze over in the stands at Citi Field, where 41,821 people layered up to watch the Rangers and Sabres play hockey outdoors. Jon Miller had never been colder at a sporting event, no trivial distinction for the president of programming at NBC Sports and NBCSN.

"But I'll tell you what's amazing," Miller said. "They had a sellout crowd and the fans had a great time, and everybody really enjoyed it. To me, that's the mark of a great event."

The Jan. 1 scene Miller will take in later this week promises to be a little easier on the skin. He's gearing up for the 12th edition of the NHL Winter Classic, the recurring New Year's Day contest that Miller and his production team are helping usher into the 2020s - with a visit to, of all places, hallowed college football territory.

When the Predators and Stars face off Wednesday at the Cotton Bowl, the Winter Classic will be far removed from the Mets' ballpark in Queens and from the home of the NFL's Buffalo Bills, the stadium where the series debuted in a snowstorm to considerable fanfare back on New Year's Day 2008. Nashville at Dallas constitutes perhaps the least conventional matchup in the game's history. An Original Six team has appeared in all but two previous Classics, and both of those outliers included the magnetic presence of Sidney Crosby.

Understandably, this will also be the first Winter Classic - and one of very few outdoor games, period - to be played in a southern state. Yet the Cotton Bowl is an oddly fitting locale to jumpstart a new decade of NHL action, and not solely because of the league's perennial desire to grow the sport in summery settings.

Before the Winter Classic entrenched itself as a fixture of the sports calendar - the NHL's answer to the NFL's Thanksgiving slate and the NBA's monopolization of Christmas Day - it came to life as a product of Miller's imagination. He thought up the conceptual contours of the game in 2004, when NBC, newly in possession of NHL telecast rights, was searching for two distinct forms of programming: a way to showcase its hockey coverage and a production of any kind to attract eyeballs on New Year's Day.

Among the factors that led Miller to suggest that a yearly outdoor game could bridge that gap: he sensed that college football was no longer predominant across all hours of Jan. 1. After all, the Cotton Bowl Classic - once a marquee TV event of the early afternoon - had moved away from that year's holiday to be played on Jan. 2.

"The Rose Bowl was on but it was late, and the Orange Bowl was on in prime time. But the other big games on New Year's Day had all kind of disappeared," Miller recalled during a recent phone call. "My feeling (was that) we had a window there to do something."

A heap of hindrances prevented the Winter Classic from being organized immediately. The 2004-05 lockout wiped out what would have been NBC's first full season as the NHL's U.S. broadcaster. Commissioner Gary Bettman liked the idea of the Classic, Miller said, but was unsure teams would participate. When marketing executive John Collins, a friend of Miller's, joined the NHL late in 2006, he championed the concept within the league but soon reported back to Miller that only one club, the Sabres, was willing to host such a game.

Ever since that 2008 game in Buffalo, though, the Winter Classic has largely come to own its 1 p.m. ET time slot. (The exception: the 2011 Penguins-Capitals matchup that was rescheduled to 8 p.m. for fear it would rain in Pittsburgh earlier in the day.) Just about every team in the league has expressed interest in featuring in the series, according to Miller. The process now calls for cities to submit formal bids to host the game, a far cry from the Sabres' involvement by default.

"I don't envy Bettman and (deputy commissioner) Bill Daly having to make those decisions on where they go to play," Miller said.

The league's decision to broaden its sights as far south as Texas is how the Predators and Stars - nontraditional franchises that are nevertheless strong attendance draws - have each come to appear in their first outdoor game of any kind. (After Jan. 1, six of the NHL's 31 teams won't have played outdoors: Arizona, Carolina, Columbus, Florida, Tampa Bay, and Vegas.) The Cotton Bowl game is the third Winter Classic, and second in a row, to be held in a cavernous college football stadium.

More than 80,000 tickets to Predators-Stars sold out in a matter of hours back in the spring, meaning Wednesday's game should feature the second-largest crowd in league history. The 2019 Winter Classic (Bruins vs. Blackhawks) accommodated 76,126 fans at Notre Dame Stadium; the 2014 game pitted the Maple Leafs against the Red Wings before 105,491 people at Michigan's Big House.

Miller said that in seasons to come, he'd like to see the Winter Classic return to past host locations for the first time. He thinks Buffalo deserves another game, and Fenway Park was a great backdrop for Flyers-Bruins in 2010. Though the Notre Dame experience proved there's no shortage of viable venues.

"I think what the league is finding now is that they can go to places that don't necessarily have a hometown team, like South Bend," Miller said. "Maybe Penn State, State College is in the mix. Who knows? That's a decision that (the NHL will) have to make, but there are certainly a lot of different places that would do a good job of this."

Wherever it's played, the game now gives Miller annual occasion to appreciate how his brainchild project - "his baby," as an NBC spokesperson put it - became something greater than a novelty. He figures the competitiveness of the series has helped it sustain: nine of 11 Winter Classics have been decided by one or two goals, and four lasted beyond regulation. So has buy-in from players, whose excitement at getting to compete outdoors, in the wind and snow and all else the environment entails, tends to be laid plain on their faces.

NHL outdoor games aren't an uncommon sight. This fall's Heritage Classic was played outdoors in Saskatchewan; the next iteration of the Stadium Series is in Colorado in February. But to Miller, New Year's remains a special date: "There's nothing quite like having all of the attention focused on you on a national holiday." And in a landscape in which the NCAA stages 41 bowl games, Miller can return to one irrefutable, and irrefutably positive, truth.

"There's only one Winter Classic."

Nick Faris is a features writer at theScore.

Copyright © 2019 Score Media Ventures Inc. All rights reserved. Certain content reproduced under license.

If you had plugged your ears on Sept. 1, 2016, and tried to tune out the rest of the world, you might have been able to concentrate on sports in the narrowest framing of the term. The National League-leading Cubs beat the Giants at Wrigley Field. It rained at the US Open, but Serena and Venus Williams won second-round matches under Arthur Ashe Stadium's new retractable roof. Lamar Jackson, Louisville's sophomore quarterback, passed and ran for eight touchdowns against UNC Charlotte, the first opponent to mount zero resistance on his march to the Heisman Trophy.

In San Diego, the 49ers visited the Chargers for each team's preseason finale. It was a Thursday night. Steven Powell, a petty officer in the U.S. Navy, sang the national anthem. Colin Kaepernick dropped to his right knee.

So started the silent protest that dominated multiple cycles of American discourse in a way no box score could. Paradoxically, Kaepernick also came to embody something essential about the 2010s, the decade in which pro athletes made their voices heard. They spoke out against injustice and abuse and for causes they considered vital. They rejected the notion that critical thought was not their domain; that acting on their convictions didn't fall within the strict bounds of a player's lane. They refused, as it were, to stick to sports.

The Cubs, the Williams sisters, and Jackson made a lot of noise on the day they authored these respective triumphs. But it was Kaepernick's quietude that resonates most in the world we inhabit - a world that is complicated and dangerous and too often unfair. Occasionally, the loudest cry to make it safer, better, a little more just, is one in which nothing is actually said aloud.

Kaepernick doesn't have a quarterbacking job these days, not since he opted out of his 49ers contract after the 2016 season and the NFL's owners and general managers - if not intentionally, then effectively - banished him from the league. Barring the slim possibility that he gets another chance to play, his will remain a lonely post to occupy.

In his protest, though, Kaepernick was never alone. Not in his resolve to object to a malignant societal trend. Not in his specific campaign against police brutality and racial injustice. And not on the very first day he assumed his solemn sideline posture; kneeling directly to his right was 49ers safety Eric Reid, his fiercest partner inside the game from that point forward.

When Reid and more than 200 fellow players kneeled en masse before a slate of Sunday games on Sept. 24, 2017 - lashing back at U.S. President Donald Trump's call, two nights earlier, for any such dissenter to be "fired" - they were emulating Kaepernick and aligning themselves with their shunned contemporary. The display of support wasn't limited to the NFL. That day, the Los Angeles Sparks sat out the national anthem in their locker room before Game 1 of the WNBA Finals. Members of the Indiana Fever and Phoenix Mercury had adopted Kaepernick's mode of protest before a game the previous September, as did American soccer midfielder Megan Rapinoe.

These players' spiritual forerunners - Muhammad Ali losing nearly four years of his prime for refusing to serve in the military during the Vietnam War; Tommie Smith and John Carlos raising black-gloved fists on the Olympic podium in 1968; Denver Nuggets guard Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf declining to stand for the U.S. anthem in 1996 - weren't of the 2010s. But this decade, athletes revived the practice of protesting on an unprecedented scale, harnessing the attention and reach conferred to them by their platform to lobby for profound social change.

Trace the trend backward from Kaepernick to 2012, when unarmed black teenager Trayvon Martin was shot and killed in Florida and the Miami Heat, led by LeBron James and Dwyane Wade, posed for a team photo in dark hoodies. (Wade wrote "We Want Justice" on the shoes he wore in that night's game.) Follow the throughline to the two-week span in 2014 when, in chronological order:

• Five St. Louis Rams took to the field with their hands in the air, a "don't shoot" gesture meant to protest a Missouri grand jury's decision to not indict the police officer who shot and killed Michael Brown;

• James, Derrick Rose, Kyrie Irving, and other NBA players warmed up in "I Can't Breathe" T-shirts to recognize the family of Eric Garner, the New York man who died after an officer placed him in a chokehold; and

• Andrew Hawkins wore over his Cleveland Browns jersey a T-shirt that read "Justice for Tamir Rice and John Crawford III," the 12-year-old and 22-year-old, respectively, shot and killed by police in Ohio.

Just as these symbolic shows of solidarity weren't contained to one person or sport, the discovery and use of this collective voice was not merely a metaphorical exercise. Athletes who spoke pointedly and courageously this decade in support of a cause formed an influential throng. In some cases, their outspokenness led to consequences that were long overdue.

Never was this combination more striking than in the 2018 conviction of Larry Nassar. Hundreds of women - led by Rachael Denhollander and counting among them Olympic champions Simone Biles, Gabby Douglas, McKayla Maroney, Aly Raisman, and Jordyn Wieber - accused the former USA Gymnastics team doctor of sexual assault. More than 150 of his victims shared harrowing impact testimony in court, at the end of which Nassar was sentenced to up to 175 years in prison. (In concert with that delivery of justice, USA Gymnastics' entire board of directors resigned within the month. Michigan State University, where Nassar also worked, settled with victims for $500 million; several top leaders resigned and a former school president faces charges for covering up what she knew.)

In November, as the decade neared its end, several former members of the Nike Oregon Project followed the lead of star American middle-distance runner Mary Cain in alleging physical and emotional abuse under Alberto Salazar, the marathon champion turned coach. The same month, similar accounts were aired in the NHL; Calgary Flames head coach Bill Peters resigned from that post after being accused of kicking and punching players on the bench and directing a racist comment toward Akim Aliu in previous jobs with the Carolina Hurricanes and Chicago Blackhawks organizations. These revelations prompted NHL commissioner Gary Bettman to mandate the creation of annual diversity and inclusion training for coaches and GMs.

The power of voice was manifest on a range of other fronts, too, as athletes spoke out for who they are and what they believe in. Robbie Rogers, Jason Collins, and Michael Sam broke ground in soccer, basketball, and football, respectively, by coming out as gay during their playing careers. In 2015, several weeks into protests at the University of Missouri over the marginalization of black students, the school's president resigned two days after football players entered the fray by threatening to boycott games. At the risk of persecution and prosecution, Enes Kanter has sounded an alarm about human rights abuses under the Erdogan regime in his native Turkey. By candidly discussing how they've experienced depression and anxiety, DeMar DeRozan, Kevin Love, Daniel Carcillo, and Robin Lehner became prominent advocates for mental health awareness.

Two exchanges from the past few years seem to epitomize this attitude shift - the full-throated embrace of an athlete's social responsibility. Both involved LeBron. On July 13, 2016, he and his close friends Wade, Carmelo Anthony, and Chris Paul stood in black suits with their hands clasped to deliver the opening remarks at the ESPY Awards, a week after police shot and killed Alton Sterling in Louisiana and Philando Castile in Minnesota.

"The events of the past week have put a spotlight on the injustice, distrust, and anger that plague so many of us," Anthony said at the top of the show. "The system is broken. The problems are not new, the violence is not new, and the racial divide definitely is not new. But the urgency to create change is at an all-time high."

A little more than 18 months later, after James and Kevin Durant criticized Trump in an Uninterrupted interview, Fox News host Laura Ingraham submitted her own spin on the stick-to-sports trope in telling the players to stop talking politics. James' retort deflected Ingraham's words back at her: "We will definitely not shut up and dribble."

What conditions made this decade different? Why did athletes seem uniquely ready to speak out in such numbers? Social media was undoubtedly a factor, enabling its users to deliver their messages straight to the people. As far back as Martin's death in 2012, James' millions of Twitter followers were immediately privy to the photo he posted of the Heat in hoodies. Aliu didn't even have to name Peters in his tweet alleging racist conduct to spark an inquiry into the coach's past behavior.

That said, it also seems something fundamental changed, transforming the substance of the message itself. The athletes of the 2010s were ubiquitously, persistently in it together, leveraging friendships and pursuing common interests that transcended the traditionally impregnable walls between teams.

This togetherness went beyond one-off expressions of support against a shared foe, though Trump's propensity for the histrionic ensured this happened, too. (See: the scores of NFLers who kneeled in September 2017, or James calling the president a "bum" the same weekend after Trump said Steph Curry wasn't welcome at the White House.) For as hard as players continue to compete between the lines, their personal relationships have evolved, revolutionizing the landscape of their sports in the process.

Athletes, generally speaking, like each other now. They embrace postgame at midcourt and midfield. They work out together in the offseason. (In August, players from no fewer than 14 NBA teams reportedly attended an invite-only minicamp near L.A. coordinated by, of all people, Kobe Bryant.) They vacation together; on one jaunt to the Bahamas in summer 2015, James, Wade, Paul, and Anthony - basketball's Banana Boat Crew - were pictured clinking wine glasses and riding the inflatable yellow vessel that inspired their collective nickname.

Bonhomie between players has a whole lot to do with the dawn of the NBA's superteam era, an age in which stars have partnered to stake a shared claim to ownership of their destiny. This development traces the arc of the entire decade, from the formation of James, Wade, and Chris Bosh's Heatles in 2010 to Kawhi Leonard persuading the Clippers to trade for Paul George this summer. The league's fraternal culture empowered the Warriors' Draymond Green to call the Thunder's Kevin Durant from the Oracle Arena parking lot on the night Golden State lost to James' Cavaliers in Game 7 of the 2016 Finals. Durant did go west, and he's now in Brooklyn, the destination he handpicked as a free agent this summer in tandem with Irving.

Especially in women's sports, athletes came together to fight for recognition and assert their shared worth. The World Cup champion U.S. soccer team is suing its national federation for gender discrimination as part of its yearslong crusade for equal pay. (In November, Australia's women's team earned an equitable split in a new deal.) American and Canadian women's hockey stars alike are sitting out the ongoing pro season to amplify their call for one sustainable league. WNBA players, who are currently engaged in CBA negotiations, have decried the minimal share of league revenue they receive and the pitfalls of exclusively traveling commercial. Serena and Venus Williams have taken up Billie Jean King's cause by calling for equal prize money at all ATP and WTA events.

Over a 10-year interval, history sometimes resembles itself. In 2014, when a recording surfaced of Clippers owner Donald Sterling disparaging black people, the team's players turned their shooting shirts inside out to warm up for a subsequent playoff game. James and the Heat duplicated the gesture before their next game; the Trail Blazers and Rockets all wore black socks. It wasn't long before the NBA forced Sterling to sell the team and banned him for life.

This past June, during Game 3 of the NBA Finals, a part-owner of the Warriors shoved and swore at Kyle Lowry when the Raptors point guard chased a loose ball into the courtside seats. The shareholder, Mark Stevens, was ejected from the arena, and the following day Lowry delivered his measured yet impassioned take. He said there was no place for Stevens in the NBA. (The league wound up fining Stevens $500,000 and banning him from games for a year.) He seconded an assertion that Green had raised in the past: Use of the term "owner," implying as it does that an athlete is an asset, should be eliminated in sports.

At one point, Lowry was asked what it meant to have the backing of James, who had turned to Instagram earlier in the day to condemn Stevens' actions.

"He's one of the biggest athletes and most vocal guys we have out there. His social activism has been amazing. And he sticks up for his fellow players," Lowry said.

"It really does mean a lot to be able to have the support of a guy like him - and other players, also."

The manifestations of this phenomenon - athletes speaking out for social causes or aligning against adversity - have limits. In October, after Rockets GM Daryl Morey tweeted his support for anti-Chinese government protesters in Hong Kong, James didn't comment on the substance of Morey's statement but said it seemed Morey didn't consider the possible consequences of his speaking out. Togetherness across MLB teams will be tested if there's a work stoppage in 2022; to tilt the economic scales back in the players' favor, the older guard may have to be willing to sacrifice a season.

As for the efficacy of athlete protests, well, there's the matter of Kaepernick's continued unemployment. Even an exiled quarterback, though, can reinforce an enduring lesson from the Ali era. Some things matter more than sports, which can nevertheless serve as a means to an end - a stage from which any player can endeavor to be heard.

On New Year's Day 2017, four months to the day after Kaepernick first knelt, his 49ers faced the Seahawks in the merciful conclusion to a two-win campaign. His performance was efficient if not memorable: He completed 17 of 22 passes for 215 yards and a touchdown. At a postgame press conference, he expressed gratitude to his teammates for standing by him all season.

The 49ers had lost narrowly, and Kaepernick hasn't played since. History will remember him anyway.

Nick Faris is a features writer at theScore.

Copyright © 2019 Score Media Ventures Inc. All rights reserved. Certain content reproduced under license.

By the second period of Great Britain's last game at the 2019 IIHF World Championship, the evidence on offer seemed damning: The Brits didn't belong at the tournament.

Little else could be said for a team that had returned to the top flight of international hockey for the first time in 25 years. After six mostly humbling losses to the likes of Canada, Finland, and Denmark, the Brits stumbled to a 3-0 deficit against France, another lowly trespasser in the mighty round-robin gamut. Britain had been outscored 41-5 to that point in the tournament. No outsider could have thought the final 30 minutes of action would look much better.

Only someone on the inside, then, could adequately explain the comeback that ensued - three British goals in the span of 10 minutes, followed by a backhand deke in overtime that found twine.

Cue the celebratory hysteria. Cue the sense that Britain maybe did deserve to stick around.

"We just had that kind of British-bulldog fight," forward Liam Kirk said several months later as he reminisced about the 4-3 victory. "We never gave in. We kept fighting. We kept believing. That was the big thing - the belief that we were going to do it."

Sage advice, that, especially for a player in Kirk's situation. By stunning France, the Brits guaranteed themselves another appearance in the World Championship's top division next spring. Avoiding relegation was an affirmation of Britain's hockey credibility and a welcome step in the nation's quest to enter the stratosphere - if not quite the innermost circle - of the sport's elite. Hang around long enough, and the case for perpetual admission will be strong.

In the meantime, there's more that Britain can do to keep pace with the Frances of this world. No born-and-bred (emphasis on the "bred") Englishman, Welshman, or Scot has ever played in the NHL. If all goes to plan - if self-belief, supplemented by tantalizing offensive skill, coalesces with sufficient good fortune - Kirk will become the first.

In Canada, Kirk, 19, is authoring the type of junior season that suggests he could one day hack it in the pros. Through 20 games, his 12 goals and 27 points slot him among the Ontario Hockey League's top 20 scorers, a hair behind his Peterborough Petes teammates (and Toronto Maple Leafs prospects) Nick Robertson and Semyon Der-Arguchintsev. Such production is hardly shabby from a winger with a radically atypical upbringing - a path from childhood to teenage stardom to, possibly, the next level that resembles no one else's in hockey.

When the Arizona Coyotes selected Kirk in the seventh round of the 2018 NHL Draft, he'd just played a full professional season with the Sheffield Steelers of Britain's top-tier Elite Ice Hockey League. Kirk was born in nearby Maltby, England, and his ascent to the Steelers' roster marked the end of his advance through Sheffield's minor system, where the scarcity of available ice time tended to limit his teams to a single hour of practice per week.

That constraint constitutes the simplest explanation for why Britain has never sent a homegrown player to the NHL. Retired veterans such as Ken Hodge, Owen Nolan, and Steve Thomas were all born in the United Kingdom but raised in Canada. Detroit Red Wings winger Brendan Perlini, the son of a Canadian who spent most of his career starring in Britain, lived in England's Surrey region until age 11 but moved to Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, for the rest of his formative years.

Kirk is fully a product of his nation's hockey programs. Now, he's looking to prove himself worthy of an entry-level NHL contract and capable, someday, of taking that elusive next milestone step.

"That will show others that they can do the same thing," he said. "I never left Sheffield. I never left the country (before age 18) to play hockey. And I still got drafted and still have this opportunity to make it further."

It has to be said that Kirk is far from a surefire future NHLer. Plenty of seventh-round picks don't wind up with a contract offer from the team that drafted them. Even if Kirk does impress the Coyotes this season, his shot at the show would still be several years off. No seventh-rounder selected in any draft since 2015 has earned a regular role in the NHL.

With those caveats in mind, boosters of British hockey have reason to be proud of Kirk's unique rise, and to err on the side of cautious optimism when envisioning his potential. Coaches and teammates describe him as a creative, unselfish forward whose offensive gifts are copious: good hands, feet, and hockey sense, with a coolness under duress and a quick, deceptive shot release.

"Whether he's got the puck on his stick or you pass to him, you know you've got a good chance of scoring," said Petes captain Zach Gallant, a San Jose Sharks forward prospect.

"We all know he can skate. We all know he can shoot. We all know he can pass," Peterborough head coach Rob Wilson added. "But I think what Liam's growing on, and trying to grow on, is the fact that now that the adjustment is over, he can be a North American hockey player. He's finding his feet and doing a very good job of it."

Kirk's adjustment to Canadian ice - and, simultaneously, to life on an unfamiliar continent - manifested in a 13-game pointless streak early in the 2018-19 season, when he first joined the Petes from Sheffield. Comfort arrived with time. Kirk has scored at a point-per-game clip ever since that dry spell, profiting from a mutually beneficial partnership with Robertson and Der-Arguchintsev, his frequent linemates at the top of Peterborough's depth chart. Scoring chances abound when Wilson deploys that talented trio.

The top line's collective breakout, not coincidentally, has run parallel to an uptick in the Petes' fortunes. The junior franchise, which counts Hall of Famers Bob Gainey, Larry Murphy, Chris Pronger, and Steve Yzerman as alumni, has played mediocre hockey for most of this century, stumbling to nine losing seasons in 13 years since a surge to the OHL championship in 2006.

With nearly a third of this season in the books, the Petes are 14-5-1, second in the OHL's Eastern Conference through Friday's games and 10th in the Canadian Hockey League's weekly national rankings (as voted on by a panel of NHL scouts). Hunter Jones, a 19-year-old Minnesota Wild prospect, is tied for fifth in the OHL among starting goalies in save percentage. Declan Chisholm, a 19-year-old Winnipeg Jets prospect, has more assists (25) than any other OHL defenseman. Kirk, Robertson, and Der-Arguchintsev, meanwhile, have combined to score 35 of Peterborough's 90 goals; the latter figure is the No. 3 team total in the league.

"Once you put a lot of lethal power into one line and we produce a lot, I think it carries on through the whole team," said Robertson, the top unit's primary finisher with 19 goals (and nine assists). "All three of us demand the puck and are comfortable with the puck on our stick and want it all the time."

As for how Kirk, in particular, is playing?

"He's performing under pressure, with trying to sign (with Arizona) and whatnot," Robertson said. "I just see a lot of confidence."

The context of Robertson's assessment is an inescapable subplot of Kirk's season. Next summer looms as a watershed juncture in his career. If Arizona offers him an entry-level contract, he'll have three years of runway to audition for a second pro deal and a possible future call-up to the NHL. If the Coyotes renounce his rights - they have until June 1 to decide - he'll become a free agent without that security and a prescribed pathway forward.

Kirk, for his part, said he tries to avoid thinking too far into the future, though he acknowledged that playing well enough to sign (and, hopefully, to earn an AHL roster spot next year) is his main personal goal for this season. He's focused on increasing his physicality, which is in line with Arizona's desire to see him play a more direct game - "Frankly, a North American-style game," said Coyotes director of player development Mark Bell - by venturing with greater frequency to the middle of the ice and into grimy goal-scoring areas.

"We're keeping a keen eye on him, and we've got a decision to make," Bell added. "There's only so many contracts we can hand out. We'll see if he earns one."

This contract calculus has cost a promising young British player before. Colin Shields might have toppled his nation's NHL barrier had the Philadelphia Flyers - the club that drafted the Scottish forward during the sixth round in 2000 - offered him a deal out of the University of Maine. They didn't, nor did the Sharks after a subsequent tryout, and Shields' American hockey travels peaked in the ECHL over two seasons in the mid-2000s.

Shields soon returned to the U.K. and carved out an unassailable legacy as the leading scorer in EIHL history (603 career points in 559 games). He played for Britain as the national team clambered from the third flight of the World Championship into the top division. He shared the ice with Kirk at each of the last two worlds before retiring at age 39 following the famous win over France.

While speaking over the phone from Belfast, Northern Ireland, Shields recounted the appreciation he gained for Kirk's attitude - his lack of cockiness and resolve to leave the ice last at practice - and for the youngster's strength on his skates despite entering this season at 6-feet, 166 pounds. He passed along the advice he'd give to Kirk heading forward: Stick it out in North America for as long as possible.

"The hockey in the U.K. is always going to be here," Shields said. "If it doesn't work out, there's always an opportunity for him to come back and play here as long as he wants."

For now, Kirk has laid down some roots on this side of the pond. He's wearing an alternate captain's "A" this season in Peterborough, where he's introduced the occasional Briticism to the dressing room - "body armor" as a synonym for shoulder pads, for instance, which Robertson initially mistook to mean deodorant.

Kirk's also grown close to his billet family. His billet mother was there last week when Kirk's parents - in town for an unexpected visit - moved him to tears in the arena concourse after a home game.

The Petes hope a deep playoff run is in the offing, though if their charge ends short of the OHL final, Kirk will at least be able to represent Britain again at the World Championship in May. Growing up, the time difference mostly restricted his intake of NHL action to next-day highlights. This year's tournament was his first chance to match up with present and future NHL stars - including, to name two of the few other teenagers in Britain's round-robin group, Jack Hughes and Kaapo Kakko - and to witness just how fast players of that caliber move the puck.

Like his draft day and this ongoing season, Kirk's participation at that tournament was an experience to enjoy and then store away, for the moment, in order to fully concentrate on the process at hand. Someday he'll retire, and then he'll have ample time, he figures, to reflect on his career's significance, and to appreciate the gravity of everything he's done on the ice and might yet do.

"Then I can sit down and see the accomplishments," Kirk said. "For now, my focus is just to get there first."

Nick Faris is a features writer at theScore.

Copyright © 2019 Score Media Ventures Inc. All rights reserved. Certain content reproduced under license.

The Toronto Raptors were still weeks out from raising their first NBA championship banner when Kyle Lowry, the team's floor general and spiritual leader, sat for a television interview at preseason media day. He craned his neck as he listened to the preamble to one question, furrowing his brow in mock horror.

"Kawhi left?" he interjected. "Oh, man."

Lowry smiled that wry smile of his. Of course Kawhi Leonard, the imperturbable superstar who led Toronto to the Larry O'B, was gone. His desire to partner with Paul George, and the machinations needed to bring the two of them to the Los Angeles Clippers this summer, rocked the entire league. Outside of Oklahoma City, no club felt the brunt of the move more acutely than the champs.

As a new season tips off next week, the Raptors' position at the outset of the franchise's post-Leonard era is at once enviable and unfortunate. Except for the 1993-94 and 1998-99 Chicago Bulls, no NBA team has ever tried to defend a championship without the services of its Finals MVP - and no champ has entered the following season with that MVP playing elsewhere in the league.

Nowhere in sports is there a perfect historical parallel for the Raptors' forthcoming next act. Those '94 Bulls lost a superior player, prime Michael Jordan, to retirement, but retained a secondary star, Scottie Pippen, who was better than Lowry and Pascal Siakam. The 1999 Denver Broncos went 6-10 after Super Bowl MVP John Elway retired; this Toronto roster, as presently constructed, probably won't slump to a losing record. Even if the 2012 St. Louis Cardinals approximated a likelier fate, winning a playoff round the season after Albert Pujols left in free agency, their formula for staying competitive wouldn't transpose seamlessly onto a team that doesn't play baseball.

Still, the Raptors might be able to glean some lessons from these teams' collective experience. They share the rare distinction of basking in the glow of supreme victory only to immediately wave goodbye, by compulsion or choice, to a core contributor to that achievement.

Their mileage varied widely. The 1998 Florida Marlins, a World Series winner dismantled in an infamous offseason fire sale, went 54-108 after trading half of their roster. That same year, the Detroit Red Wings motored to a second straight Stanley Cup title despite restricted free agent and future Hall of Fame center Sergei Fedorov holding out for three-quarters of the season in search of a new contract.

Taken together, insights from members of these teams produce a macroscopic roadmap of how the Raptors - or any future champions that find themselves in this situation - can navigate the aftermath of a star's departure. It's a four-pronged process, starting with the need for the players who still populate the dressing room to band together and avoid lamenting what could have been.

"It's never going to feel good when you lose the value we lost," said Cliff Floyd, a Marlins outfielder during that down 1998 season. "Once you understand the business side of the game, in any sport, you keep it moving and keep your head high and you keep fighting."

Make the best of what you have

When Jordan, the MVP of three consecutive NBA Finals at age 30, retired from basketball in October 1993 at the peak of his powers, Bulls point guard B.J. Armstrong was keenly aware of the sad context that framed his decision. Jordan's father, James, had been murdered in North Carolina that summer. As his teammate of the past four seasons grieved, Armstrong was primarily concerned with being a good friend.

On the court, Armstrong presumed the Bulls would be fine. By 1993, Jordan had already compiled a bountiful greatest-hits reel, reminding opponents from Craig Ehlo ("The Shot") to Clyde Drexler ("The Shrug") that he could dominate any game on his own. Yet Jordan was also a terrific team player, Armstrong said, one whose "true genius" was rooted in his understanding of how to integrate his talents into a cohesive five-man unit.

As Jordan and Pippen guided the Bulls to dynasty status, their frontline effort was supplemented by quality depth. In 1993-94, with Armstrong, power forward Horace Grant, and center Bill Cartwright still around to start and rookie swingman Toni Kukoc deployed as a capable scorer off the bench, the Bulls reeled off two separate 10-game winning streaks and finished third in the Eastern Conference, quelling doubts that they'd even make the playoffs.

"Everyone in that locker room understood, you know what, there's strength in numbers," said Armstrong, who is now a basketball agent at Wasserman. "That's what made the Bulls the Bulls. They understood the concept of team."

Togetherness was a common focus across this sample of atypical defending champs. In the late 1990s, Elway's leadership and Pro Bowl arm catapulted the Broncos to back-to-back Super Bowl victories, but he needed plenty of help. His supporting cast included running back Terrell Davis, receivers Ed McCaffrey and Rod Smith, tight end Shannon Sharpe, and a top-10 defense anchored by Neil Smith, John Mobley, and Bill Romanowski.

With those kinds of teammates, "you've got dudes around you who can get some things done," said Chris Miller, whom Denver signed to back up Brian Griese at quarterback after Elway retired. Each of those dudes was still there in 1999 to help bear the load.

Like Denver without Elway, the 1997-98 Red Wings could continue to lean on superlative depth during Fedorov's holdout: Six future Hall of Famers were still in the lineup. As with the 1993-94 Bulls, real life forced the Wings to grapple with a greater tribulation. Early that offseason, star defenseman Vladimir Konstantinov was gravely injured in a limousine crash that ended his career.

The magnitude of Fedorov's absence paled in comparison, recalled Darren McCarty, the hard-nosed winger who played 13 seasons in Detroit. He said the highs and lows of the Red Wings' previous few seasons - late-round playoff defeats in 1995 and 1996, followed by a breakthrough Stanley Cup championship and, suddenly, the accident - brought him and his teammates closer than ever before: "You'd do anything for them."

The Wings were united in their resolve to play well in Konstantinov's honor, defenseman Larry Murphy said, and to ensure their hunger to win another Cup - a possible stumbling block for any title team - never waned.

"You basically have to look at what you've got in the dressing room, and you have to believe that that's enough to win," Murphy said. "Confidence is the toughest thing to manufacture. We had confidence that we could do it with what we had."

Seize new opportunities

The 1998 Marlins were a wretched baseball team. They raised a World Series banner and beat the Chicago Cubs at home on Opening Day, then promptly lost 11 games in a row. They duplicated that losing streak as May turned to June. They finished the season in last place in the majors, nine games worse than expansion franchise Tampa Bay - a fate foreseeable from the moment owner Wayne Huizenga ordered payroll slashed as he sought to sell the club.

To Floyd, an up-and-coming backup outfielder on the 1997 title team, Florida's freefall was "awful" to endure. After the championship roster was razed, the lineup left behind consisted largely of young players who had to fight each day to merely stick in the big leagues, a combination that doesn't tend to produce many wins. Only four Marlins posted a WAR of 1.5 or better in 1998.

One of those few remaining standouts was Floyd, who was tapped in his fifth MLB season to succeed All-Star Moises Alou as the Marlins' everyday left fielder. At age 25, he applied the advice that several traded veteran teammates had impressed on him: Rise to the occasion when you get the chance to play. After a cold spring at the plate, Floyd settled into his new role and went on to lead the team with an .818 OPS and 22 home runs.

"How you go about taking advantage of the opportunity is going to give you whatever you have (in) your career," said Floyd, who is now an MLB Network analyst. "If you have longevity, then you were able to hold your head high and go ball. If not, you're going to have a short career." Floyd's career was long: He started in the majors for another decade and was an All-Star in 2001.

The 1993-94 Bulls weren't torn apart in a fire sale, but Jordan's retirement created the same type of window for others to step up and shine. Playing and shooting more often, Armstrong and Grant became first-time All-Stars that season. Pippen averaged career highs in points (22.0), rebounds (8.7), and steals (2.9). Tied against the New York Knicks late in Game 3 of the second round of the playoffs, head coach Phil Jackson put his faith in Kukoc to shoot for the win; he beat the buzzer with a contested 23-foot fadeaway.

Without Fedorov and Konstantinov, the 1997-98 Red Wings scored only three fewer goals (250, down from 253) than they had the previous season, thanks to consistent production from Steve Yzerman, Brendan Shanahan, and Nicklas Lidstrom, along with increased contributions from players such as Murphy and forward Doug Brown. (They also allowed one fewer goal against: 196 compared to 197.)

Slightly lower in the lineup, McCarty was already familiar with the "next-man-up mentality" needed to compensate for key absences; he'd been counted on to elevate his play after Detroit dealt Dino Ciccarelli away in 1996.

"You're doing it after you've won (a title). There's sort of this attitude that, well, 'We're champions. We've got to figure it out,'" McCarty said. "It's not going to be easy, but this is how you create new stars. Different guys get the opportunity."

Trust your coaches and grind on defense

In a recent phone interview, Cartwright, the starting center on the first set of Bulls squads to three-peat, began to muse about a characteristic that helps separate good teams from the chaff: a clear identity. Under Jackson, Cartwright said, the Bulls played defense - whether Jordan was in the lineup or not.

In the 1990-91, 1991-92, and 1992-93 regular seasons, Chicago posted top-10 defensive ratings of 105.2, 104.5, and 106.1, respectively. Without Jordan, a formidable perimeter defender, that mark actually improved (102.7) in 1993-94. By embracing a system that called for them to guard with unrelenting effort - and, specifically, to wall off the paint and force opponents to try to score from outside - the Bulls gave themselves the best possible chance to keep winning.

It isn't easy to convince a team to invest such energy in every single game, Armstrong said. For that, he credits Jackson and his staff, arguing that 1993-94 might have been the Hall of Famer's finest coaching performance.

"Anyone who's had an opportunity to win championships, you understand you can't shoot well all the time. You might not play well all the time," Armstrong said. "But you can defend every night."

That mindset also imbued the 1999 Broncos with hope that they could continue to win without Elway - and, from October onward, without two more tentpole offensive players. Davis and Sharpe suffered season-ending injuries in successive weeks.

Even as the offense cratered, falling from second-best in the NFL in 1998 to 18th, Denver's defense remained sturdy despite losing Mobley to an ACL injury in Week 2; it allowed only nine more points than it had the previous year. Playing the hardest schedule in the league, the Broncos lost 10 games that first season without Elway, but seven of those losses were by six points or fewer. In five, the margin of defeat was three or fewer points.

Through Denver's spate of hard luck, the standard of play head coach Mike Shanahan expected from his team didn't waver. Miller, the backup quarterback, said Shanahan and offensive coordinator Gary Kubiak demanded perfection, and they demonstrated through their leadership the level of preparation that is required to compete for championships.

"When we went through fine-tune Friday practices, if the ball hit the ground, we were all shocked," said Miller, who now coaches high school football in Oregon. "The expectation level was extremely high. That permeated from the management through the coaches to the players, and it translated to Sunday."

Keep everything in perspective

The multitude of outcomes these depleted champions experienced suggests that the coming Raptors season could go any which way. Maybe OG Anunoby and Norman Powell excel in expanded roles, enabling Toronto to win a playoff round or two. Maybe the Raptors stumble and trade veterans for draft picks that could augment a retool built around Siakam. Maybe Siakam makes exponential strides for a second straight year, proving he can be the fulcrum of a contending team's offense.

Even worst-case scenarios can beget silver linings - like when Floyd discovered during the Marlins' terrible 1998 season that he never wanted to play for a last-place club again. While he established himself over the course of the year as a dependable big-league hitter, he realized that mashing the ball isn't always enough to manufacture a winning atmosphere.

"If you want to be a leader, then you can't let this happen again. You've got to be an enforcer," Floyd said, summarizing his major takeaway from the season. "I took away a lot of little things that were going to kick me in the butt when I felt like I could see that type of situation happening again."

In Chicago in 1994, the Bulls had greater reason to focus on the positive. After sweeping the Cleveland Cavaliers in the first round of the playoffs, they lost a seven-game rock fight to the Knicks in Round 2, a defeat that would have constituted a severe letdown had Jordan been part of the proceedings.

Without Jordan, though, his old teammates emerged from the year disappointed but at peace. They felt they had achieved about as much as possible, knowing they would have been in line to eliminate the Knicks - and possibly advance even further - had a famously disputed foul gone uncalled at the end of Game 5.

"I enjoyed playing with that team as much as any other team I played for in the NBA, because we maximized our potential," Armstrong said. "What else can you ask (for)?"

Let's leave the last word to the '98 Red Wings, who did not have to settle for a moral victory at the end of their season. The Wings already sat near the top of the NHL's Western Conference standings when Fedorov finally returned at the end of February, his contract impasse having been resolved when the Carolina Hurricanes tendered him an offer sheet that Detroit matched.

His reintegration to the lineup went impeccably. Fresh from his long holdout, Fedorov scored 17 points in 21 regular-season games and added 20 points during the playoffs, second on the team to Yzerman. Detroit won three series in six games and swept the Washington Capitals for the Stanley Cup. Yzerman, the captain, lifted the Cup first, before placing it in the lap of Konstantinov in his wheelchair.

The Wings may not have reclaimed the Cup without Fedorov, but even before his return, McCarty said, the players knew they were going to be OK. They had already won a title, after all, and no future result could nullify that feeling.

"Guys will be like, 'Oh yeah, (losing a star teammate) sucks - but dude, look at this ring. They can't take that away from me,'" McCarty said.

"It's a big difference, the fact that you win and (then) you lose a guy. You're on a different level now. And it doesn't matter if you're on the bench or how much you played. There are Hall of Fame guys who will never get the opportunity to raise a trophy."

Nick Faris is a features writer at theScore.

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