BOCA RATON, Fla. -- The NHL has continually reminded everyone that there is no strict timeline for expansion -- if, of course, the NHL expands at all.
But in one sense, there is. The earliest the NHL would expand is for the 2017-18 season, and if the league wants to hit that timeline, the clock is ticking.
In a conversation after his session at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference in Boston, commissioner Gary Bettman confirmed that the league would likely outline what an expansion draft might look like during this week’s GM meetings in Florida.
Part of that is because of timing. If the league hopes to expand for the 2017-18 season, Bettman wants to give general managers one full transactional year to prepare their rosters. Thus, an expansion announcement for that season would have to come before free agency opens this year on July 1.
“They should have a full year,” Bettman said. “We’re only getting close if we’re going for 2017-18; [it] doesn’t mean we have to do it by July; we could do it July 15, but it might be for 2018-19.”
The NHL outlined a potential expansion draft for its executive committee during the December board of governors meeting in California.
Presumably, more details have been worked out since then, although Bettman was quick to say that the expansion draft process hasn’t been finalized.
“We might talk to them in broad strokes as to what conceivably it might be, but we’re not ready to give them a specific set of rules because a) we haven’t decided if we’re expanding, and b) there’s something that will have to be finalized and formulated before we can do that. We may give a sense of what we’re thinking but nothing specific,” Bettman said.
With an expected expansion fee of $500 million, GMs believe the expansion draft rules will be the strictest yet, so that Las Vegas or Quebec would immediately have a competitive team and maintain the league’s parity.
There will likely be limits on how much salary a team can protect, and GMs anticipate that good players will be lost from their rosters.
“I’m assuming the worst,” a Western Conference GM said. “They’re coming in at $500 million. The league is going to give them every advantage they can.”
So a full transactional year is probably the bare minimum GMs need to have in order to effectively protect their most important players.
“If that’s what the rules are, you make them work,” Penguins GM Jim Rutherford said on Sunday. “We’d all like more time, but we’re aware expansion is possibly coming, and the commissioner has given us a heads-up for a couple years that it could possibly happen. So be prepared for it, it’s not like it’s coming out of the blue.”
Nine more takeaways from the weekend of hockey:
2. The Penguins' goalie dilemma
It's a good bet that teams will be allowed to protect only one goalie, and that gets troublesome for franchises that have a veteran in place but a high-end young goalie on the way. It becomes even more complicated if that veteran has trade or movement protection in his contract.
The Penguins would fall under that category.
According to GeneralFanager.com, Marc-Andre Fleury can submit a list of 12 teams to which he cannot be traded. The fascinating debate will be how this will work in terms of the expansion draft. The NHLPA believes that no-movement clauses will be rock-solid and prevent teams from exposing players with those stipulations in their contracts. If the no-trade lists can include a potential expansion team, that could mean a team like Pittsburgh would have to protect Fleury and then expose the talented Matt Murray, a player they refused to trade when teams inquired at the trade deadline.
There’s no way the Penguins will let that happen, but it may take future shuffling and more clarity of the rules down the road.
3. How the Pens survive without Malkin
A more short-term problem for the Penguins is surviving without Evgeni Malkin, who could be out as long as eight weeks with an upper-body injury he sustained against the Blue Jackets on Friday.
“I knew when Geno got hit, I knew he was hurt,” Rutherford said.
It had to be a sinking feeling, because it was going to be a challenge for the Penguins to make a run this spring with Malkin -- now the degree of difficulty goes up even more.
Nick Bonino will get more opportunity in the top six, and it’s a chance for role players to step into the spotlight for the Penguins.
4. Sheary makes his mark
On Sunday, that player was Conor Sheary, who scored twice to help the Penguins win a big one against the Rangers.
“That’s what happens at this time of year, somebody else steps up at different times,” Rutherford said. “[Sheary] is a real skilled, quick forward. He played good games for us when he’s up, and he’s been up and down this year. He’s working his way to being a full-time guy here. He’s very competitive.”
5. Latest on Kronwall
The Red Wings were dealt an injury of their own when Niklas Kronwall hurt his knee against the Rangers on Saturday in an overtime win for Detroit. The good thing is that the injury doesn’t sound serious.
“Slight knee sprain,” Red Wings GM Ken Holland wrote in an email.
The timeline is expected to be one to three weeks. That's good news with regard to the playoffs, where having a rested Kronwall will be a positive. The challenge is making sure the Red Wings get in; the Flyers are banging on the door.
6. What Renouf can do for Detroit
Detroit quietly added even more organizational depth on defense when it signed college free agent Dan Renouf, whom the Red Wings followed closely at the University of Maine. There they saw a player who made steady and positive development, and they like the fact that they’re adding size on defense, an area of need, according to assistant GM Ryan Martin.
“Dan possesses good mobility and defensive awareness; he has decent size and edge to his game,” Martin wrote in an email over the weekend. "We don’t have a lot of size on the blue line in our prospect group. In Dan, we feel we are adding a nice combination of skill, skating, size and competitiveness.”
7. Reality check from Torts
There was a great line from Columbus head coach John Tortorella on Sunday after the Blue Jackets' loss to the Lightning. A few Columbus players and fans thought Lightning goalie Ben Bishop did some embellishing during a collision with Nick Foligno.
Tortorella is not afraid to call out specific players on other teams, and Columbus Dispatch writer Aaron Portzline gave him the opportunity during Tortorella’s postgame news conference when asking about Bishop.
Tortorella didn’t take the bait.
“When you’re in the situation we’re at here -- we’re not even in it -- you need to eat it,” Tortorella said. “You shut your mouth and eat it. I have thoughts about some of the things that went on there tonight, but I’m in no position to say anything because we’re not in it. They are.”
8. Bettman's financial forecast
Circling back to this week’s GM meetings, one thing the managers might get from the league is an updated salary-cap projection. At the December board of governors meeting, the league projection came in at $74.5 million for the 2016-17 season. It’s a number that many teams feel is a bit optimistic, considering the instability of the Canadian dollar.
Bettman said the number remains a good estimate for next season.
“It’s in the ballpark,” he said. “The Canadian dollar is back up again. ... You guys make a bigger deal out of it than I do. I watch it come and go and deal with it.”
9. Help is on the way
Bettman did a lengthy Q&A at the Sloan Analytics conference on Friday and covered a lot of ground in a session deftly handled by NBC’s Liam McHugh.
One topic that didn’t come up, somewhat surprisingly in an analytics conference, was NHL.com’s growing pains with its new stats and analytics package. It’s been criticized for having incorrect data, something Bettman acknowledged when we chatted after the Q&A.
“We’re fixing it,” Bettman said. “We’ve made some fundamental changes. We had a lot to move all at once. It’ll all get fixed.”
When?
“As fast as possible,” he said.
10. Revising the NHL draft lottery
We’ve banged this drum a little bit during the course of the past week, but we expect at least some cursory debate at the GM meetings over how the draft lottery will be handled moving forward.
The league typically lets previous changes play out, and the NHL is in Year 2 of a transition that makes it harder for the league’s worst team to pick No. 1 overall. That’s the expectation coming out of this meeting.
But at the very least, there will be GMs throwing around ideas at dinner or on the golf course, and this one, emailed by a Western Conference GM, is intriguing:
“I personally like the somewhat radical concept that the team who accumulates the most points once it has been eliminated from playoff contention will ‘earn’ the top pick in the draft,” he said. “It flips the script, and actually gives bad teams an incentive to win games late in the year. Isn’t that what we want?”