TORONTO — The NHL remains alarmed about the state of construction for Milan’s Olympic hockey arena, so much so that the league is sending over its own people to inspect the arena next week.
“It continues to be concerning,” NHL deputy commissioner Bill Daly said after the NHL general managers meeting on Tuesday.
Derek King and Dean Matsuzaki from the NHL will be in Milan next week to check things out, Daly said.
The Olympics are just 90 days away, and while the NHL is getting weekly updates on arena construction, Daly said it needs to see the progress firsthand.
“Hopefully we’ll have a much better sense of it next week,” Daly said.
NHL commissioner Gary Bettman previously sounded the alarm after the Board of Governors meeting in New York on Oct. 15, after the Associated Press reported that the first test event for the arena, set for December, had been canceled.
The International Olympic Committee told The Athletic the following day that the arena is “scheduled for completion mid-December” and that a new event had been scheduled for early January, roughly a month before Olympic competition is set to begin at the arena on Feb. 5.
In other news from Tuesday’s NHL GMs meeting:
• Jared Maples, senior executive VP and chief security officer for the NHL, spoke to GMs in the meeting in the wake of the NBA and MLB gambling scandals. Daly said the message was consistent with what “we have been emphasizing with the clubs regularly.” Maples reminded GMs about the need to be careful about injury information and careful with the rules. The NHL felt it was a timely update, given what’s happened in other leagues.
• The NHL is still working with the individual Olympic countries’ federations and the NHL Players’ Association on reveal dates for rosters. The deadline is Dec. 31 for each country to submit full rosters, but the days that each country will announce those rosters are still being formalized.
“I think what you’ll see is the U.S. and Canada will reveal around New Year’s and the rest of the countries will reveal after the World Juniors are over,” Daly said.
The tentative plan is to announce around Jan. 1 for the U.S. and Canada, and around Jan. 6, the day after World Juniors conclude, for other countries.
• The NHL is going to a reduced preseason next year as part of the new CBA, with four games maximum per team. Daly said the league talked to GMs on Tuesday about the roster requirements for those games.
“The only restriction we negotiated with the (NHLPA) was 100-game players can’t play more than two (preseason) games,” Daly said. “But I’ve tasked Doug Armstrong and his executive GM group to talk through the issue and make a proposal to us with what they want enforced on player lineups for exhibition games.”
The aim, Daly said, is to produce more NHL-like lineups in preseason games than the league has typically had in recent years.
• Daly said they ran out of time and didn’t get to one item on the agenda: the playoff salary cap and the day-to-day logistics of how it’s going to work, especially on gamedays.
“It’s really just the mechanics of submitting the list (of players) that’s got to be approved for each game, like in terms of timing and sequencing and all those logistical issues which are important,” Daly said. “We’ve got to try to make it mirror the current situation as much as we can so that there’s no unintended consequences.”
As per the new CBA, gameday lineups in the playoffs will have to be submitted by 3 p.m. local time. But what’s still being discussed is allowances for legitimate injuries that pop up or illnesses closer to gametime. The league feels there needs to be some flexibility.
