Your preliminary need-to-know for the season:
- The salary cap goes up yet again, this time to $104 million. For the few teams that know how not to spend there, the floor is $76.9 million. Yes, that means more money for GMs to make bad spending choices - and rest assured, they will.
- The season expands from 82 games to 84 games, because … rea$on$.
- There’s a Heritage Classic this year, on October 25 at Princess Auto Stadium in Winnipeg between Montreal and the host Jets.
- The international games are in Helsinki, Finland on November 12 and 14 between Carolina and Seattle, and then December 18 and 20 in Dusseldorf, Germany between Chicago and Ottawa.
- The Winter Classic is December 31 in Salt Lake City, where Utah will play Colorado at Rice-Eccles Stadium. Utah’s appearance means every NHL team will have played in at least one outdoor game.
- There’s a Stadium Series game on February 20 at Jerrah World between Dallas and Vegas.
- The All-Star Game is February 6, with the Islanders hosting. It’s a 5-team, round-robin format featuring the U.S., Canada, Finland, Sweden and “Rest of the World” in 3-on-3, 5-minute games and the top-2 teams play a 10-minute “championship” game. Which, I guess is better than the divisional-based games where guys got to play 10 minutes and half were done, but I and most other fans probably still won’t care about this format.
- The regular season starts TBD, likely late September.
- The regular season ends TBD, likely early April.
