NHL to vote on adding more games

NHLPA executive director Paul Kelly surprised some earlier this season when he suggested the players would be in favor of adding a couple of games to the NHL regular season, to make it 84 instead of 82.

Sources say the NHL board of governors will get its chance to vote on that concept this weekend in Atlanta at the NHL All-Star Game.

The governors have previously been lukewarm or even opposed to bumping up the schedule to 84 games, but that proposal was often in the context of going to the Detroit Red Wing-sponsored schedule matrix, where there would be a home-and-home (30 games) series with all teams in the opposite conference.

It's difficult to know for sure whether the governors were more opposed to the heavy out-of-conference schedule matrix than the 84 games itself, but the sense is this time around there's a decent, if not good, chance for 84 games to get approved by the league.

Kelly initiated the 84-game talk for a variety of reasons.

NHL teams are currently permitted to play as many as nine pre-season games during the 20-day training camp period, although on average they play seven. Under Kelly's proposal, pre-season games would be capped at five, so in effect, the two extra regular-season games would simply replace pre-season matches.

Training camp would also be shortened by three to five days, in the 15 to 17-day range instead of the current 20. Those days would be tacked onto the NHL regular season to allow for the extra couple of games.

And Kelly says the players are also in favor of playing more out-of-conference games, that players in the East like the idea of playing more often against the West, and vice versa. The extra two games would be against out-of-conference opponents.

If there's an area where this proposal could get a little dicey with the governors, this could be it.

It took great time and effort for the NHL to come up with a schedule matrix that the majority of teams would buy.

They finally did that this season, at the last board meeting in November in Pebble Beach. Here is what they decided on: six games against each of four divisional opponents (24); four games against each of 10 conference opponents (40) and one game versus each of 15 out-of-conference opponents (15) with three wild-card games against select out-of-conference opponents (3), for a total of 82.

Canadian teams, for example, bought into this matrix because they know the three-wild card games would allow the eastern teams (Ottawa, Toronto and Montreal) to play the western teams (Vancouver, Calgary and Edmonton) one more time apiece.

While nothing is carved in stone at this point, a new 20-game out-of-conference block would likely be broken down as follows for each NHL team: a home-and-home series with one out-of-conference division (10), a home series with one out-of-conference division (5) and an away series with one out-of-conference division (5). The divisions would rotate on annual basis so over a three-year cycle it would be a balanced number of games against each out of conference opponent.

Whether that type of configuration might temper the revenue-induced enthusiasm for 84 games remains to be seen.

In order for 84 games to become a reality, a two-thirds majority vote (20 or more out of 30) is required.

If the 84-game format gets approval this weekend, it still remains to be seen whether it could be introduced in time for next season.

The NHL has already requested its clubs to provide available dates for next season and that was done on the 82-game basis. It's not necessarily impossible to implement 84 games for next season but it's not automatic either.

But first things first and the first order of business is to vote.

The truth is, in an ideal world, the NHL should be looking at reducing the number of games played, not increasing them. But that's simply not going to happen.

Whether it's next season or the one after that, one would think that whatever concerns exist over an 84-game schedule, the attraction of creating revenue with one more home gate per team will ultimately win the day

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