Playing Catch Up

As tends to be the case, a lot went on in the CHL while I was gone. I had hoped to blog yesterday, but then this happened, and I didn't have a spare second for the rest of the night.

So, now is the time for me to start trying to catch up on everything. Let's start with the two teams that announced their suspension of operations for the 2009-10 season while I was 33,000 feet in the air.

Joining the Rocky Mountain Rage, who made their announcement in June, were the New Mexico Scorpions and Oklahoma City Blazers.

I can't imagine many people were surprised to hear of the Scorpions' fate, but everyone, including the Central Hockey League itself, seemed taken aback by the Blazers' announcement.

These decisions had an effect on two things that the Bucks care about: the free agent pool, and league alignment. I'll get to the free agent stuff in my next post, but let's talk about alignment now.

The CHL announced the alignment and playoff format for the upcoming season soon after the Scorpions and Blazers made their decisions.

Instead of having four divisions, the league will break things up into just the two conferences, with all Texas teams and the Arizona Sundogs comprising the Southern Conference and the Northern Conference losing Oklahoma City and Rocky Mountain and adding the Missouri Mavericks.

The playoff format will remain basically the same with the top five teams from each conference qualifying but obviously will not have to allow for two divisional champions per conference. Full information about the format can be seen here.

There were also quite a few signings and re-signings while I was gone, but the most relevant proved to be the Corpus Christi IceRays bringing back Ryan Bennett, Justin Quenneville and Chris Richards and thus revealing that the league has changed the vet limit to 300 games from the previous standard of 280.

From the release:

Bennett’s signing also comes with the recent news from the CHL office that the parameters for CHL veterans for the upcoming season has changed. The new classification for veterans are players who have played over 300 professional games prior to the upcoming season.

We'll see if that has any effect on who Coach Ruskowski looks to bring to Laredo this season.

Other news and notes from the past couple weeks:

- Bill Lankhof from the Toronto Sun did a great piece about the remarkable recovery of former CHL player Jason Baird, who was injured in that tragic lawnmower accident last year and is now well enough to return to his home in Corpus Christi.

- Former CHL coach Mark French is taking over as head coach of the American Hockey League champion Hershey Bears, and former CHL player Troy Mann will be his assistant. I've been to Hershey a few times; it's probably a very fun place for the coaches' and players' kids, haha.

- The Colorado Eagles will host an NHL preseason game between the Phoenix Coyotes and Tampa Bay Lightning on Sept. 23