Crossing Our T's & Dotting Our I's (part I)

[This is the first piece in a two-part column on the expansion front. In Part 1, I give you a reset as to what has transpired thus far. In Part 2, I will provide the insides to what is being leaked from the GM meetings and how it will affect the process.]

As the NHLs general managers glad-hand this week down in Florida, there has been an uptick of discussions regarding expansion. This time it isn’t due to a softly-veiled comment (Foley’s January/February interview), but an itemized meeting topic in which the GMs around the league can begin to get a feeling for what is to come should the league finally come around and award a franchise to Las Vegas.

For the sake of this piece, if not simplistic honesty, I will only be including one expansion team in the discussion. It’s been clear that Quebec is a second option to expand, but for many reasons it won’t happen. For those nuggets I would extend an invitation to the numerous podcasts and articles detailing why they are not going to be selected. For Vegas, their ticket was punched as the main items have been checked off the list in recent years; an owner willing to pony up a rumored $500 million for a team, a stadium that is state-of-the-art and ready to house a team, and 14,000 season ticket commitments. At issue now for Foley and for the league are two large points that have been discussed for months; when will the team take to the ice, and how the rules will be structured for them to field a team.

Through the last 6 months, it has been made clear that the 100^th anniversary of the NHL would be the key season to expand, which would keep with the tradition of making large moves at important milestones (the league’s Original Six, the Western Expansion at its 50^th Anniversary). So the next question that I had was how soon a team would be able to drop the puck after getting a seat at the table. With that in mind, I was able to find an outlier in the 1990s expansion process whereas Nashville was able to enter the league only a year after being awarded a franchise. In January, I spoke with their play-by-play announcer, Pete Weber, who was able to give me a first-hand account of how the process played out. What I learned was that first off, the ownership was willing to get into the league as fast as possible to grab market share (this was to be the season prior to the Titans moving to Nashville, so they wanted to be the first franchise), and secondly that a quick turnaround is possible. Both of these items are mirrored to Las Vegas’ situation and desires.

As the dog days of winter set in, there was a significant lull in any expansion discussion. This lead many to pile on that the process had stalled. The Executive Committee met on a couple of occasions to discuss the bid, but there was very little that became public. We were led to believe that the sure thing that was the Las Vegas Rat Pack was over (maybe until Seattle joined the process?). With this week’s GM meeting, however the rational thinking returned. The conversation is now much more real with the team’s roster-builders knowing that they need to be involved in the process prior to the end of the season, free-agency, etc. How are they going to prepare for 2016-17 and beyond when they know they are going to have a wide-ranging change in the run-up to 2017-18?

“We have a general sense of what it’s going to be just by having been part of past expansion drafts,” said Edmonton Oilers GM Peter Chiarelli. “I think we’re all planning already, it would be nice if we could have it by this June.” (http://sports.yahoo.com/blogs/nhl-puck-daddy/nhl-gms-thrilled-with-3-on-3-all-star-game--gms-meetings-notebook-191927469.html)

As Chiarelli rightly expresses, and to a bigger point, what made the lull around the trade deadline so significant is that how can the current 30 GMs be expected to go about business as usual without having the rules governing expansion? Quite simply they can’t, and further, without knowing they are unable to fully exploit the up-coming changes. In the expansion period during the 90s, teams were allotted a certain number of players that could be protected from an expansion draft. What they were offer little to us now, and even less to anyone else who is being paid millions of dollars to win a Stanley Cup. The NHL now is much different from 16+ years ago. The league is younger, faster, and of course there is a salary cap.

So what is next? The GMs are most likely going to get the full monty in terms of what the Executive Committee has already shared with the Board of Governors. The inclusion of the GMs in this circle of information is a key step to the expansion process because it now shows there is enough of an understanding in the process to widen the depth of knowledge already collected.  When details start to fly, I will return with a comprehensive look at what it all means for the formation of a new expansion team in year 1.