NHL expansion in Salt Lake City appears imminent

The prospective new owners issued a press release —with suspicious timing— about NHL expansion in Salt Lake City. This appears to confirm the NHL has plans to expand to 34 teams, which would be the most in American professional sports. Naturally there is still a long way to go in this process. The NHL is just a few years separated from expanding to 32 teams with Seattle.

Remember, expansion is not included in Hockey Related Revenue (HRR) for the salary cap ceiling. If the cost for expansion is $600 million, that’s divided among the 32 existing owners equally, and players do not get that cash. Shocker that they’d be looking to expand.

The Frank Seravalli tweet was specifically used to address the bigger story today, and that is of the 5 players that have requested leaves of absence, 4 from the NHL and 1 from Switzerland, from their respective clubs. It’s easy to draw the lines from leaves of absence to being involved in the 2018 World Juniors Canada sexual assault scandal.

This is not something we will speculate about here, even if the writing appears to be on the wall. We will wait until things are confirmed. We know nothing, it is a criminal matter, and it would be irresponsible of us to speculate about something so serious.

That said, given the NHL’s/hockey’s history of handling these matters poorly, they’ve opened the door to this sort of speculation. It would behoove Hockey Canada and the league to address this head on sooner rather than later, within legal limitations, of course