Mayor wants Maple Leafs in Toronto
With cases of COVID-19 continuing to surge across North America, there are still plenty of health concerns regarding professional sports and having players continuously travel to various different cities. The issue becomes even more complicated when it comes to cross-border movement between Canadian and American clubs.
For the most part, Canadian sports teams have been forced to play their home games in the United States. The Toronto Blue Jays and Toronto Raptors are two perfect examples of this. However, they are both the only Canadian team in their respective leagues and so the solution was a fairly simple one.
The National Hockey League has a total of seven Canadian clubs though and as a result, has decided to re-align their divisions for the upcoming campaign in order to create an All-Canadian division. This will ensure Canadian teams only play against each other and that no cross-border or mandatory quarantine periods are required. The plan seems to makes sense and has already started to get approval from the majority of provinces across the country.
The Toronto Maple Leafs are one team who have still not been given official approval from the province of Ontario, but fans of the club received some good news on Wednesday morning. The mayor of Toronto, John Tory was on local radio station Kiss 92.5 talking about the situation the Maple Leafs are in. He made it clear though, that he believes the club should be allowed to play in their home building – Scotiabank Arena.
“We have written a letter, Toronto public health and the city government, saying it’s OK with us based on the protocols put forward,” Tory told the Roz and Mocha show, via Sportsnet. “It’s now in the hand of, I think principally the federal government and the province, to say yes or no but we have said for our part that we think this is manageable, we would like to see the Leafs playing at Scotiabank Arena. They put forward a great arrangement to keep people safe and healthy. So I guess we’ll wait to see what the others have to say.”
Scotiabank Arena did host games this summer when the NHL decided to conclude the 2019-20 campaign inside of a bubble. Toronto was the host for the Eastern Conference playoffs, while the Western Conference postseason was carried out across the country in Edmonton. Teams were kept inside of a bubble though and were not travelling to various parts of the continent.
While the all-Canadian division will certainly help Toronto’s case to host games, there are still concerns in regards to public health. Ontario reported over 3000 positive cases of COVID-19 for the third day in a row on Wednesday and there are genuine worries that the healthcare system cannot handle the uptick in cases.
Time is running out for a decision to be made though, as the Maple Leafs are scheduled to play their first home game of the new season on January 13th, against their biggest rivals the Montreal Canadiens. They travel to Ottawa for their first road game of the season on January 15th.
