OHL start date official soon
Darren Dreger: OHL general managers are meeting today. It is expected that the OHL will announce that the 2020-21 season will start on February 4th. Training camps could open on January 25th. Playoffs should involve eight teams.
NHLPA executive board meets
TSN: Pierre LeBrun said the NHLPA had their first executive board meeting since June when they were working on the CBA. The player reps have lots of questions but with so many unknowns there likely aren’t many answers.
“I’ll stress once again that the joint committee of the PA and the league have not yet met to begin proceedings on figuring out what this upcoming season will look like.
After this executive board meeting there are also going to be team by team meetings held by the NHLPA throughout the week so that all 700-plus players get to ask questions, and there are a whole lot of questions. When do they move back to their NHL cities? What about schools for their kids and their families? A lot of pertinent questions for players regarding the 2020-21 season, which is still really an unknown.”
Six different scenarios for next season
TSN: Darren Dreger said the NHL is working on as many as six different playing scenarios that they could use for next season. This includes the idea of an all Canadian division.
“It could be just one city, one hub, that houses all seven Canadian teams, but there are some big concerns over what happens if you start that way and then the world gets healthier and you have to flip back to normal divisional play inside a regular season. Logistically that could be a nightmare. You could see two hubs in the U.S. if the Canadian restrictions don’t soften moving forward but this is all a day by day process and nothing is finalized.”
No recent Olympic talk
TSN: Pierre LeBrun said there haven’t been any recent talks about the Winter Olympic participation. Since the NHL and NHLPA agreed on the CBA this offseason, they have obviously been working on other things, but the February 2022 Olympics are getting closer.