NHL commissioner Gary Bettman admitted on Saturday that he "would not be surprised" if the start date for the 2020-21 season "slips into later December, [or] could slip into January."

"There's still too much we don't know," Bettman said Saturday, speaking from the Edmonton bubble ahead of Game 1 of the Stanley Cup Final. "Nobody can tell me whether or not the border between Canada and the United States will be open by a certain date, nobody can tell me what the state of COVID-19 is going to be, nobody can tell us whether our arenas will have either socially distanced or fully occupied buildings. And we're going to have to do the same thing we did for return to play: explore all the options, be flexible and agile enough to implement when the appropriate time comes."