Bill Daly Talks Schedule Changes, CBA Talks And Effectiveness

Some NHL executives and players were in Milan, Italy, last week as part of the league’s yearly media tour – this time in the place the league will be sending its players to the 2026 Winter Olympics. Deputy commissioner Bill Daly was part of the contingent there and sat down for an interview with Michael Russo of The Athletic, discussing some items that have been left unaddressed from last month’s Collective Bargaining Agreement extension and Memorandum of Understanding approval.

One of the key changes in the agreement is a jump from an 82-game regular season schedule to 84. That will take place beginning with the 2026-27 campaign, and Daly essentially confirmed that means an earlier start date – with regular-season games now potentially beginning in September.

It’s not as if there was another direction to go. More in-season breaks and elongated playoff scheduling in the later rounds have made for some exceedingly late finishes to the season in recent years, leading to key events such as the Stanley Cup-clinching game, the draft, and the opening of the following season’s free agency period taking place in a sub-two-week period.

“I think that 82 to 84 games is going to be beneficial to both sides,” Daly said. “It comes in connection with a shortened training camp. I think that can help us on our overall calendar length. I think we’ve started our regular seasons earlier as a general matter and our playoffs earlier, which some of the media have suggested we should.”

The other most forward-facing change in the new MOU is, for the second decade in a row, a reduction in maximum contract length. After the 2012 lockout ushered in an era of eight-year extensions and seven-year free agent deals, those caps are both decreasing by a single year in the new agreement.

That was arguably the league’s highest priority entering negotiations with the NHLPA alongside the LTIR reform that also got achieved, Daly said. “We’re in a situation where we have a number of contracts that are entered into for maximum term, with the parties recognizing that the player’s not going to be really worth what the contract will pay him in the out-years of the contract. So, the more purely monetary benefits of longer-term contracts are kind of scaled back a little bit. That’s really the benefit.”

Previously, excessively frontloaded contracts were retroactively penalized with a recapture penalty. That was an exceedingly rare thing to trigger, though, and only happened if the player decided to retire and walk away from their contract instead of failing physicals and remaining on LTIR for the duration of their career. Along with the term reduction, there have been more safeguards put in place in the new MOU to restrict year-to-year variations in compensation in multi-year deals, but chopping off a year to spread the total package across will be the most effective way to reduce the number of artificially lowered cap hits and AAVs league-wide.

As for when all these changes take effect, the previous presumption was that none of the new policies announced last month would be enforceable until September 15, 2026, when the current MOU expires and the new one begins. That won’t necessarily be the case, Daly said, although NHLPA assistant executive director Ron Hainsey had previously confirmed that the current contract term limits will still be in effect for the 2026 offseason and won’t be reduced until that September date.

Nonetheless, Daly clarified there will be multiple stages of implementation regarding all the changes laid out in the MOU. “I don’t want to presuppose their approval, so I’m not going to answer the question specifically. But it does deal with every item that we agreed to as part of the memorandum of understanding. One bucket of items will go into effect as early as this year. One bucket of items will go into effect as of July 1 of next year — so, the league year, the full league year. And then there’s a list of items that don’t go into effect until Sept. 16 of next year.“