NHL Meetings Reveal Changing Landscape

The annual NHL meetings in Las Vegas wrapped up this week with everyone making their way to Miami for the start of the NHL Entry Draft, which begins tomorrow evening. In just a short couple of days, the NHL has changed quite a bit, chief among them a new format for overtime, the inclusion of a coaches challenge, and the league formally exploring the option of expansion.

With the meetings taking place in Las Vegas, it seems only appropriate that the biggest news was the league officially throwing open the doors on the possibility of expansion, specifically in Las Vegas. Prospective owner Bill Foley was given an opportunity to prove to the NHL fan interest was there when he kicked off a season ticket campaign in February with a goal of securing 10,000 season ticket pledges. Over 13,000 names and an arena already being built later, the NHL and commissioner Gary Bettman had no choice but to open the doors on bringing a franchise to the desert.

While Bettman re-iterated throughout the week that nothing was imminent, the formal process for expansion is almost never opened by the NHL unless the league feels secure it will end in an official proposal to expand. While a team in Vegas seems all but assured at this point, they won’t begin playing until the 2017-18 season, giving the league time to find a second location to potentially expand to. With the league currently unbalanced with 16 Eastern Conference teams to 14 in the West, any expansion allows the league to come closer to correcting the discrepancy.

Other prime cities the league is considering for expansion are Seattle, which still needs a new arena and someone to head up a potential ownership group, and Quebec City, which has an NHL-ready arena in place and a handful of potential ownership groups but carries the stigma of having lost a team just 20 years ago.

Expansion fees for this round of expansion are expected to begin at $500 million, meaning the potential ownership groups will need deep pockets and patience as their teams will not see the ice until 2017 at the earliest. A league vote among the NHL owners on whether or not to formally invite a team for expansion into the NHL is not expected until September at the earliest at the start of the year owner’s meetings.

As for the on-ice product, a handful of changes were accepted and will be put in place at the start of next season. The most notable of the changes is the change of overtime from 4-on-4 to 3-on-3 with OT remaining a five minute, sudden-death period. Should OT end in a tie, the game will still be decided by a shootout, though this switch in format is designed to reduce the number of shootouts, which was on the rise significantly in recent seasons.

The NHL Player’s Association was adamant in their refusal to adopt the AHL model of OT, where teams play five minutes of 4-on-4 hockey, followed by 3 minutes of 3-on-3. The numbers of shootouts in the AHL decreased dramatically, giving hope that fewer games will be decided by the glorified skills competition of the shootout.

The other on-ice change was a minor tweak to faceoffs. On all faceoffs other than center-ice draws, the defensive player (the player whose back is closest to his own goaltender) will be required to the place his stick on the ice first. This is designed to give a minor advantage to the offensive player. In a league that continues to explore ways to increase scoring, this is a small change that likely will not have a significant impact on its own.

The last change approved by the NHL is the inclusion of coaches’ challenges on offsides and goaltender interference situations that directly lead to goals. Too many times in recent years we’ve seen cases where calls were missed in regards to these two situations and despite obvious video evidence, there was no potential recourse for coaches in pursuing the correct calls on the ice. It’s a small but important step as the league searches for ways to clean up high-profile and avoidable officiating mistakes.