Weekly Rumours – The Big Questions for Next Season
3 years ago
The free-agent talk has really died down and there aren’t a lot of significant trade rumours floating around either, but that doesn’t mean this is a dull time for hockey fans. We still don’t know what next season will look like but there is plenty of chatter about what it could look like.
The league still says that it’s target start date is January 1st. That leads me to believe that they would want training camps opening up in early December. That feels unlikely. I’m just not sure if it’s realistic to expect the NHL to figure out everything they need to in the next three weeks. The timeline is just too tight.
I think a more realistic plan would be to have the players report to their home cities just after Christmas and have training camps officially open on January first. Have a week-long training camp, then play a few exhibition games, and start the next regular season around mid-January.
Even with that timeline, some teams might not be very happy with only two or three exhibition games. Teams that weren’t a part of last season’s playoffs have already gone around eight months without playing a game. They might want more time to prepare for next season.
Nailing down a start date and a plan for how training camps and the exhibition schedules will work will be a complicated process.
Aside from when the season will start, there are two other big questions that will need to be answered before things can get going.
The first is how many games will the season be. Most insiders seem to think it’s highly unlikely that we see a full 82 game schedule, but there really isn’t an exact number being widely reported. Somewhere between 48-62 games does seem like a safe bet, although that’s a pretty large window.
Secondly, what will the divisions look like? I’m personally not a huge fan of the reported all-Canadian division but it’s starting to sound like it’s gaining some serious steam. While I don’t love it, I will admit that it makes sense. If there are still significant border restrictions come January, then it will be way easier to eliminate the border issue and keep all the Canadian teams together than it would be to create a plan that has both the seven Canadian teams travelling south of the border and also have the American teams come up to play road games in Canada.
It’s pretty clear that the players and league both want to do long-term bubbles. The players don’t want to be away from their families. In the recent player poll done by The Athletic, the players that were surveyed almost unanimously voted against long-term bubbles.
For the league and it’s 31 teams, a long-term bubble would solve some problems, but it would create some other issues. Elliotte Friedman recently pointed out that if games aren’t held at their normal times and in their normal arenas, it could create problems surrounding arena naming rights deals and local TV contracts.
Gary Bettman recently talked about ‘short-term bubbles’ and having teams go to one spot and playing a bunch of games over the course of 10-12 days without travelling, and then going home. That would certainly make scheduling easy, but it still brings up problems over the start times for games, local TV contracts, and other revenue streams.
I know I said the rumour mill was quite right now, but there are still some interesting stories floating around. Apart from talk about the next return to play, here are some other rumours I’m keeping an eye on.
QUICK NOTES
- There was some talk this week that if @Corey Perry wants to return to the Dallas Stars, he would have to take a pay but, which is surprising considering he had a base salary of just $1.5 million last season. If money is his priority, then the rumours about him potentially going to the Ottawa Senators make sense.
- There was some talk that the Dallas Stars could be interested in Erik Haula. That makes sense considering they’ll likely be without @Tyler Seguin for the first few months of the season.
- Jason Gregor recently wrote about the idea of the Oilers putting Oscar Klefbom on LTI before the season began. He notes that it seems like Ken Holland would do that considering they don’t have much cap space and still need to sign @Ethan Bear to a new deal.
- Gregor also adds in the idea of the NHL allowing teams to have a ‘taxi squad’ this season. I would imagine the league will do this, especially if teams aren’t in bubbles.
- Kurt Leavins from The Cult of Hockey reported that @Dominik Kahun left money on the table to sign in Edmonton. Not surprising considering the fact that he’ll have a chance to become a mainstay in a very skilled top-six.
- It’s been great to see players take less money to come to Edmonton. That’s the ‘Connor and Leon Effect’ and I don’t think this is a one-year trend. If this works for players like Kahun, Barrie, and even Ennis then I think it will become a regular occurrence for players to sign one-year deals in Edmonton, hoping to have a career year next to one of the teams’ superstar centremen.
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