With the intention of getting the new NHL season started in mid-January, the NHL's Board of Governors held a call on Wednesday to hash through some of those details.
You probably saw the latest incarnation of the division realignment. It still puts the Vancouver Canucks in the travel-heavy Canadian Division but tweaks the U.S alignment slightly from the version that we first saw a week ago. Now, Philly and Pittsburgh are back together, preserving their rivalry, but St. Louis and Chicago have been broken apart.
According to
Ben Kuzma of The Province, the goal is to finalize the planning and bring it to a governors' vote about a week before Christmas — or, put another way, around the end of next week.
Covid-19 testing for players would begin on Dec. 26, ahead of a training-camp start on Jan. 3, with the season beginning on Jan. 13. No exhibition games, since there's no extra revenue to be gained from those contests with no fans in the stands. The league wants to get started with games that count as soon as possible.
Kuzma also says that the plan is for main rosters will be expanded from 23 to 26 players, with four additional players kept nearby on the taxi squad. I can't wait to see how the salary cap gets adjusted to compensate for those extra bodies.
In the bubble, teams were allowed 30 players plus unlimited goalies — more than enough. The Canucks ended up using 23 skaters and two goaltenders in game action, plus Louis Domingue as backup to Thatcher Demko while Jacob Markstrom was injured.
But as we've seen in the European and college leagues, and in the NFL, if the coronavirus makes its way into a dressing room, it can take out a significant chunk of a roster in a very short period of time. I guess that's when postponements could end up coming into play.
And will we see more injuries than usual? It's such a short runway to get ready, but we saw after the 2012 lockout that a hot start can make all the difference in a shortened season. Remember the Blackhawks' insane 21-0-3 run to start that 48-game campaign in 2012-13? They didn't lose in regulation until the season was more than half over, and were able to parlay that momentum all the way through to the Stanley Cup.
According to Kuzma, "A taxi squad would allow the club to keep its top-four projected recalls in Vancouver to train and practise, collect their AHL salaries and NHL benefits. That will keep longer-term NHL prospects in Utica to play a season projected to start Feb. 5."
One other note — Darren Dreger mentioned on
TSN's Insider Trading on Tuesday that the league is once again looking at including an opt-out option for players and personnel who, for whatever reason, don't feel comfortable dealing with the risk of Covid-19.
Obviously, that's significant for the Canucks. If Sven Baertschi was to choose to opt out again, as he did in the summer, what would happen to the last year of his salary? My best guess is that he would still be paid, but the money shouldn't count against the salary cap — it would be more like an LTIR situation.
If that's the case, that could open up some flexibility for Jim Benning under the cap. Though Baertschi spent last season in Utica, he still counted for $2,291,666 against the Canucks' cap, as they were only able to get relief of $1.075 million on his cap hit while he was playing in the AHL.
Once the return-to-play plan is ratified, expect the wheeling and dealing to begin in earnest around the league. We may not have the usual holiday trade freeze this year, with so much needing to be done in such a short period of time!
The Canucks got one more bit of business complete on Wednesday, when they signed RFA defenseman Jalen Chatfield to a new one-year, two-way contract.
The deal is worth the league-minimum $700,000 at the NHL level, and $125,000 at the AHL level — which is actually a drop from last year, where he was set at $820,000 at the NHL level.
The 24-year-old right-shot defenseman, who was originally signed by the Canucks as an undrafted free-agent out of the Windsor Spitfires in 2017, has yet to make his official NHL debut. But even though he hasn't seen game action, he has gotten a number of short-term call-ups from the Canucks as injury insurance over the last couple of years, and was on Vancouver's expanded roster in the bubble in Edmonton this summer.
Chatfield's low cap hit could give him an edge over other players who will also be competing for that third-pairing spot on the right side that was vacated with the departure of Troy Stecher in free agency. For months, Jim Benning has been talking like Chatfield's skill set also gives him the inside track.
“He’s a guy that we identified, signed, working with him in his development. He’s put in a lot of work in the off-season,” Jim Benning told
Patrick Johnston of The Province.
“We lost Chris Tanev and (Troy) Stecher. When I watched him play, he’s a cross between the two of them. He’s a mobile guy like Tanev, he can move the puck out, he competes hard. He’s a competitive defensive player who can transition the puck up ice.”
According to Johnston, Benning is now back in Vancouver after spending the offseason at his home in Portland, and is nearing the end of his time in quarantine.
According to Kuzma, players would need to be in Canada by Dec. 20 in order to complete their 14-day quarantines before the opening of training camps. Some other possibilities are being floated, including treating camp itself as a cohort quarantine. But with case numbers higher in most Canadian jurisdictions than they were during the summer restart, it might be tough to get health authorities to sign off.
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