NWHL gets second chance to crown champion after COVID-19 postponement

Tyler Tumminia can't quite exhale. The commissioner of the National Women's Hockey League is excited and apprehensive, eager and worried, with the NWHL approaching the second chance it wasn't always clear it would get. It was seven weeks ago, Feb. 3, when the league's bubble season in Lake Placid fell apart when two teams withdrew because of positive tests for COVID-19.

But the NWHL has another shot. The Toronto Six, Boston Pride, Connecticut Whale and Minnesota Whitecaps will play at Warrior Ice Arena in Brighton, Massachusetts, this weekend to crown a champion.
It means the NWHL won't have to be without a titleholder for a second consecutive season, after the championship last season was canceled because of COVID-19. It means the NWHL won't have to give up national television appearances, with all three games to be broadcast on NBCSN.
"It means everything," Tumminia said.
The Six and Pride will play at 5 p.m. ET on Friday in the first semifinal, followed by the Whale and Whitecaps. The final will be at 7 p.m. ET on Saturday. All three games will also be livestreamed on NBCSports.com and on Twitch in Canada.
Not that Tumminia is allowing herself to think too hard about what those final moments Saturday will be like.
"I won't let myself get there yet," Tumminia said. "I really, truly won't. I have to take it one step at a time because so many things change. I haven't put myself there yet."
It has been a long and a very short road.
The two-week season that began in late January with the league's six teams, including the Buffalo Beauts and Metropolitan Riveters, included the promise of exposure and attention. But it ended with disappointment when the season was suspended one day before the playoffs were set to start, which Tumminia attributed to not enough league enforcement of the protocols set up by the State of New York.
"When you lose that chance," Tumminia said, "for an athlete, for what it means for these athletes to get on [national TV] and showcase their skills and get their names out there on that kind of platform and they lose it? It's not only heartbreaking, but there's a lot of sorrow that goes into it.
"You can go one of two ways: You could just say, 'Well, we can shut it down,' or you can do what these athletes have shown, which is to have a lot of resiliency going back into this. There's this fight that they have in them. … It means everything to them to get back on the ice."

Tumminia had started working on it even as she was packing up the rink in Lake Placid, making calls and trying to woo sponsors and NBC Sports back to the table. She succeeded.
"Discover called us on a Friday and they were like, 'The women's game, we need to make sure that you guys raise the Cup'," Tumminia said. "It's important to women's hockey."
She got the Boston Bruins and general manager Don Sweeney on board and arranged for Warrior -- the Bruins practice facility -- to host, putting in immense work to get it ready for a national broadcast.
"We were definitely building and then for it to come to a stop was difficult," Six forward Shiann Darkangelo said. "But obviously we understand the reasons that it had to. We're just excited to have this opportunity to play again and to sort of finish what we started."
Multiple players mentioned unfinished business. That is twofold for the teams that wanted to finish a season with a championship and for a league that wanted to assert its place in the sports landscape, especially having almost missed out on the opportunity that came with a national TV spotlight.
"I think it's pretty incredible to have this opportunity," said Winny Brodt Brown, a 43-year-old defenseman for the Whitecaps, "just because when I started playing hockey when I was 4 with all the boys and then growing up playing until I was 17, I never thought that playing on national TV would ever even be a possibility.
"I was lucky enough to wait it out at my age and be in one of the first games to be able to do that and have that opportunity."
At the same time, Tumminia had always believed the NWHL could get back here, that they weren't going to give up so easily. She knew what it meant to crown a champion, to the history of the league and its growth going forward.
"It means so much," she said. "It means so much to the women's game. To be able to say, hey, athletes, guess what [this is happening]. I'm getting goosebumps just talking about it right now; the reaction, it's just happiness and tears, and not to be taken for granted. We know that this opportunity doesn't happen for many."
Photos: Michelle Jay