Well, the 2015 NHL All-Star Festivities are in the books, and the Canucks get back to work later today in preparation for tomorrow night's home game against the Anaheim Ducks.
Vancouver has set a late start time of 3 p.m. for today's practice, as everyone rolls back into town.
Radim Vrbata will be making the long trip back from snowy Columbus after scoring the first of an NHL-record 29 goals in yesterday's game. He also added one assist in 13:27 of ice time, playing on a line with Ryan Nugent-Hopkins and Zemgus Girgensons.
Local boy Ryan Johansen was named MVP of the tournament by a partisan crowd in Columbus, and local boy Brent Seabrook mentioned how much fun it was to join the tournament as a participant after taking in the 1998 All-Star festivities here in Vancouver as a youngster. Nice to know I wasn't the only one who enjoyed that weekend, though I'm guessing my experience was just a bit different from that of a 12-year-old Seabrook.
As the Canucks get ready to get back on the ice, we have confirmation now that Kevin Bieksa has had surgery on the broken bones in his left hand and is expected to miss 6-8 weeks of action, which will take us to mid-to-late March. If the Canucks can get by successfully without him through that stretch, a fresh Juice could offer a real boost heading into the last few games of the season—and the playoffs.
SportsClubStats pegs Vancouver as the 13th of 16 teams that are virtually assured of reaching the postseason. The Canucks' playoff odds as we head into the important part of the season currently sit at 92.4 percent.
It'll be interesting to see what moves teams make to try to prepare themselves for their second season—or their attempt to secure Connor McDavid when the June draft rolls around.
The Stanley Cup Champion Los Angeles Kings are in tough to even get back to the dance this year: their playoff odds are currently a bleak 46.8 percent.
The team has played a lot of hockey over the past three seasons, and was ill-prepared to lose defenseman Slava Voynov. The bold moves for the stretch run started today when they put their expensive fourth-line center Mike Richards on waivers.
Richards has five more years after this one on a contract with a cap hit of $5.75 million per season, according to
Luke Fox of Sportsnet.
The Kings would dearly love for another team to pick up the contract and free them up some cap space so they can improve their team. If Richards and his fat deal clear waivers, he'll be assigned to the Manchester Monarchs and Los Angeles will receive just $925,000 in cap relief.
My guess is that Richards will clear. It'll be interesting to see if another team is willing to put itself on the hook for that contract.
Even though Richards originally signed his deal with the Flyers, it looks like it is the Kings who would be responsible for any cap recapture penalties if he was to retire, according to
Spector's Hockey. We sure miss CapGeek on days like these!
All seems reasonably quiet for now surrounding Canuckville. We'll see over the next five weeks whether Jim Benning can make a deal to improve his team, if Zack Kassian will finally get a new address, whether one of the backup goaltenders gets moved, and how he chooses to deal with impending unrestricted free agents Brad Richardson, Shawn Matthias and Derek Dorsett.
World Cup of Hockey
If you've been away over the weekend, my blogs during that time included a look at life on the farm down in Utica and the progress of the Canucks' junior prospects. Check the archives if you'd like to catch up—and yesterday's comments for a fun discussion of British art-rock bands.
One other bit of news that came down the pipe over All-Star Weekend was the announcement that the World Cup of Hockey will indeed return in Toronto in September of 2016.
As has been rumoured for months, the tournament will feature eight teams. National squads will be built for Canada, the U.S., Russia, Sweden, Finland and the Czech Republic, then the tournament brackets will be filled out by two All-Star squads: a "Young Guns" team made up of players of all nationalities who are 23-or-under and a "Hodgepodge" team (my term) that will include top players from second-tier hockey nations like Slovakia, Switzerland, Denmark, Latvia, Germany, Slovenia, Austria and Norway.
Here's the NHL's official announcement about the event, which will run from September 17 - October 1, 2016.
It's always fun to have another big hockey event, but I'm very worried that this one will come at the expense of the 2018 Olympics. The NHL isn't thrilled about the distance to Pyeongchang, South Korea, or the time change that could see hockey games running at non-prime times back in North America.
Most importantly to the league, I think, the NHL's revenue stream and influence are both quite limited with its Olympic participation. The IOC is very protective of its Olympic trademarks, which limits the NHL's opportunity to make money on the event. And the IOC and IIHF have their own set of rules, over which the NHL has only a small degree of influence.
The World Cup is an event that's run completely by the NHL, under NHL rules, where 100 percent of the revenue will go to the league. Though nothing has been decided yet about the Olympics, the World Cup could also serve as a substitute or, at the very least, a negotiating tool, as Bettman prepares to play hardball with the IIHF about NHL participation in Pyeongchang in 2018.
I want to see NHL players at the 2018 Olympics, so I'm viewing the 2016 World Cup with some trepidation. I don't want it to end up being a half-hearted substitute.
Vancouver Canucks Blogger • 
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