The NHL has backed off from its request for financial concessions from its players, and is moving full-speed ahead with planning for the 2020-21 season.
For a broad look at the latest news as of Tuesday morning, feel free to check out my Forbes article:
According to multiple reports, the plan is to aim for a 56-game season, starting Jan. 13. As
Larry Brooks lays it out in the
New York Post, training camps will kick off just after Christmas — less than three weeks from now.
Quarantine requirements mean that players are now migrating back to their club cities — or, at least, into Canada.
Over the weekend, I saw that Jordie Benn had landed in Victoria with his fiancee and new baby.
After months' worth of Instagram stories about his maple syrup business, Antoine Roussel posted a rainy clip from the Vancouver seawall on Tuesday morning. And Jacob Markstrom did the same a couple of days ago, en route to Calgary. That still seems a bit strange to say.
The hope is that the plan can be settled — and approved by both players and owners — this week. But there's lots to consider.
First off: where to play?
As we've heard, the owners' preference is to play in their home arenas, and players made it clear that they didn't want to go back to a bubble after the playoffs. But the Covid-19 situation is worse now than it was during the summer, and health authority restrictions are in place.
The NHL's chief content officer, Steve Mayer, said during a media panel for SportTechie on Tuesday that 42 percent of the league's teams are currently authorized to have *some* fans in the stands — which works out to 13 of 31 clubs. At the other end of the spectrum, arenas are currently completely closed in San Jose, Winnipeg and Montreal — not even practices are allowed.
Vancouver falls somewhere in the middle. As you know, a handful of players have been doing small-group workouts for the last couple of months. But the province's 50-person limit on gatherings is still in place and, for the moment, the ban on all adult group sports activities has been extended to Jan. 8.
That has created a strange situation in the BCHL, where players 18 and under are classified as 'youth' and are allowed to practice, but the 19 and 20-year-olds are off the ice entirely.
Ben Kuzma dug into the quarantine situation surrounding the Canucks for
The Province a couple of days ago.
Jim Benning said the team has been processing work visas and stayed in contact with health authorities. They may be able to once again plan something like the 'cohort quarantine' that they executed during summer training camp, where players from foreign countries were essentially allowed to train and skate together while quarantining in a distinct group.
I imagine the goal will be to limit the size of the training camp group. In addition to the extra players that we saw in the summer crew, I'd expect we'll also see Nils Hoglander and Jack Rathbone, who will both get a shot at making the team. Also Will Lockwood and Marc Michaelis?
The idea of taxi squads for Canadian teams with U.S-based AHL affiliates continues to be bandied about. The AHL remains on track for a start date of Feb. 5, but I believe fans are still not allowed in arenas in New York state, so I'm not sure where that would leave the Utica Comets.
Fans are not allowed in Michigan, which is why the Canucks' ECHL affiliate, the Kalamazoo Wings, announced on Monday that they'd be suspending their 2020-21 season, with a plan to return in 2021-22. That'll add another layer of challenge to how the Canucks' development pipeline will work.
But the good news is that we should start getting some answers to these nagging questions in the days and weeks to come. And with any luck, we're less than three weeks from the opening of training camp, when we can start digging into the on-ice issues surrounding the 2020-21 Vancouver Canucks — and in five weeks or so, we'll have games!
Vancouver Canucks Blogger • 
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