Peace in our time!

Friends, I’ve been covering the National Hockey League and the Calgary Flames for awhile. Heck, the first season I covered after joining FlamesNation, 2012-13, was delayed by several months and shortened because of a lockout. (My first NHL game in the press box was the second home game of 2012-13.)

So you can imagine my excitement – and relief – that the NHL and NHLPA announced their agreement on a collective bargaining agreement extension last week, just before the first round of the NHL Draft. On Tuesday, we got better news: the NHL and the NHLPA have ratified the CBA, and so we’ll have labour peace in the NHL at least until the end of the 2029-30 season.

It’s worth pointing out how wild this is, given how NHL labour relations have been since the 1990s. In that span, we’ve seen a player’s strike in 1992, followed by a half-season lockout in 1995-96. The Flames’ 2004 Stanley Cup Final appearance was followed by a year-long lockout that wiped out the entire 2004-05 season – it’s reflected on the Stanley Cup with “Season Not Played.” And the expiration of the CBA that came out of that lockout resulted in another lockout in 2012-13.

Heck, while there was a CBA extension negotiated in 2020 that brought us to 2025-26… it was the result of pretty insane circumstances: a worldwide pandemic that paused the 2019-20 NHL season and caused a dramatic realignment of the league’s business and calendar for several years.

While we’ll have more specifics on the new CBA once the MOU documents are made available by the NHL and NHLPA, here’s what we’re expecting to see starting in 2026-27:

• The regular season expanding to 84 games and pre-season being cut back to four games.
• Maximum contract lengths changing to seven seasons for re-signings (down from eight) and six seasons for free agents (down from seven).
• A streamlining of how long drafted player rights are held by NHL clubs, with everyone’s rights held until the age of 22 regardless of when they’re drafted or the league they’re drafted from.
• The introduction of full-time emergency backup goaltenders that travel and practice with teams.
• The introduction of a post-season salary cap to eliminate the LTIR “loophole.”

If you’re a Flames fan: good news, they get an additional home game in the final season in the historic Scotiabank Saddledome. But bad news, the maximum contract length for Dustin Wolf’s next deal with the Flames is now “just” seven years.

We’ll have way more details about the new CBA once we have a chance to dig into the MOU documents.