Quietly and with little fanfare, the National Hockey League sent a clear signal this week that it is serious about addressing the quality of its on-ice product. How did they do it? By persuading its primary developmental league, the American Hockey League, to test a possible rule change in the middle of its own season.
For eight games, beginning with the Dec. 27 meeting between the St. John's Maple Leafs and Hamilton Bulldogs, the AHL will add two feet of width to each blueline and one foot to either side of the centre red line, thus expanding the neutral zone by four feet.
For purposes of determining a two-line offside pass, the new wider ice markings would effectively enable a team to make an outlet pass two feet earlier. The theory behind the experiment is to determine whether an expanded neutral zone would improve the overall flow of the game. Under the new system, the actual size of the attacking zones would remain unchanged.
A number of former and current NHL players, including Hall Of Fame defenceman Denis Potvin and Buffalo Sabres captain James Patrick, have previously endorsed the idea, believing a wider blueline would make it harder for teams to use the neutral zone trap.
"The zones don't change size, but if you're passing the puck out of the zone, as soon as the puck touches the blueline, you can pass it to the far blueline, which, in effect, would add four feet to the neutral zone," Patrick said.
AHL president Dave Andrews said his league agreed to conduct the test to "assist the NHL with the growth and development" of the game. It follows that the AHL would be amenable to try other experiments on behalf of the NHL, if this initiative is well received.
Only four Canadian-based AHL teams, the aforementioned two and the Manitoba Moose and Toronto Roadrunners, will participate in the test. The last of the eight games will be played on Jan. 24 in Winnipeg, at which point the league will assess the experiment and deliver a report to the NHL's GMs at their post-all-star game meetings in Las Vegas. That Jan. 24 game, incidentally, will be televised across Canada on Rogers Sportsnet.
Blues clues: More and more, it looks as if the St. Louis Blues will not get defenceman Al MacInnis, recovering from early-season eye surgery, back in their lineup.
"We're approaching it as if he's not going to play this year and then, hopefully, he gets his eyesight back," coach Joel Quenneville said. "He's around and he's starting to do some working out, but he won't be fitted for his lens for at least a month. They're waiting for that healing process to completely take place. Then he'll be fitted with a lens that will hopefully get his vision back to normal. But he's got no eyesight, no vision, out of it right now. So the whole process, the total healing time, you're looking at later on in the season. Then we'll see."
MacInnis is not the only Blues defenceman who has spent significant time on the injury list this season, but even without him, Barrett Jackman, Alexander Khavanov, Bryce Salvador and others, they remain in the hunt for the Western Conference championships.
Through yesterday, they were unbeaten in eight, had lost only once in their 12 previous games and were just behind the Detroit Red Wings in the Central Division standings with five games in hand.
How are they doing it?
In a word: Chris Pronger.
The NHL's 2000 most valuable player, who missed all but five regular-season games a year ago recovering from wrist surgery, is playing spectacularly well for the Blues. He is averaging more than 27 minutes a game in ice time and, according to Quenneville, is starting to control games again.
The Ovechkin sweepstakes: As Christmas approaches, the NHL races remain tight as ever, and nowhere is this more evident than at the bottom of the standings, where four teams are in contention for the worst record in the league: the Columbus Blue Jackets, Chicago Blackhawks, Pittsburgh Penguins and Washington Capitals, who all had 23 points through yesterday.
Why does finishing last matter? Well, consider that the 30th-place NHL team will have, statisically, the best chance to win next year's draft lottery and get an opportunity to land Russia's Alexander Ovechkin, considered the best prospect in a decade.
Of the four contenders in the Ovechkin sweepstakes, only Pittsburgh's troubles could have been easily predicted, especially after team captain Mario Lemieux went out of the lineup after just 10 games because of problems with a chronic hip injury. The Blackhawks are struggling, mostly because they lost their No. 1 goaltender, Jocelyn Thibeault, to a hip injury. Instead of trying to land an experienced replacement, Chicago opted to go with rookie Michael Leighton, who has been typically inconsistent. The Capitals spent the first two months playing like a team trying to get its coach fired -- and they ultimately succeeded. Chances are that by season's end, they will have pulled away from the rest of the tortoises in the race for Ovechkin.
That just leaves Columbus, a team projected by many as a possible playoff contender because of its off-season spending spree. In a year when few teams waded into the free-agent market, the Blue Jackets signed two of their own unrestricteds, Andrew Cassels and Geoff Sanderson, and then went out and inked two others, Todd Marchant and Trevor Letkowski. They also grabbed defenceman Darryl Sydor from Dallas in a three-way deal that cost them only journeyman Mike Sillinger. Two years ago, they boosted theblueline by signing Scott Lachance and Luke Richardson as a free agent.
So why isn't Columbus any better? After Rick Nash (19) and David Vyborny (10), they do not have a single player with more than five goals. Marchant is providing leadership to the team, but his numbers are way down from last year (three goals and 15 points in 29 games). Richardson, Jaroslav Spacek and Rusty Klesla have all missed some time this season, but their primary shortcoming is an inability to win on the road. They are 0-10-1-2 away from Nationwide Arena. Sanderson has only four goals in 28 games after scoring 34 the season before.