Tuukka Rask (Photo courtesy of Alison M. Foley)

We’re not a straight-NHL news blog, so we’re leaving the reporting of NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman’s announcement of the league’s way ahead yesterday to others.

We can’t compete with the news sites/blogs who generate far more traffic than this blog does, but here’s the nuts and bolts as far as the Bruins are concerned based on what came out.

1. They get a bye and will play the other three bye teams in the East (Tampa Bay, Washington and Philadelphia) to determine first-round seeding. Games to be played while the play-in series are ongoing, meaning the bye teams get their needed tuneup.
2.  Hockey will phase back slowly with training camps not opening up until beginning of July at the earliest, assuming all goes well with the reopening. There will be a brief exhibition contest window before the play-in and seeding games crank up.
3.  The NHL is figuring out the hub city model where the games will be played. Boston isn’t one of ’em, so where the B’s will end up playing is TBD.
4.  Because they are not one of the 7 non-playoff teams (Detroit, Ottawa, San Jose/Ottawa, New Jersey, Anaheim, Los Angeles and Buffalo) nor are they one of the 8 losing play-in teams (TBD in terms of lottery winning percentages) not to mention the fact that Anaheim owns Boston’s 1st-round pick as a result of the Ondrej Kases trade, the B’s have zero shot at winning the 2020 NHL draft lottery, which will take place on June 26. The B’s won’t be picking first until the end of the 2nd round at the earliest, barring any trades that happen between now and whenever the NHL actually has the draft, so there’s not much point in speculating about any of this if you’re a B’s fan.

Overall, it’s good that the NHL is putting the plan in place to get things going. It’s a separate debate altogether about whether you believe the plan is going to work and/or it is worth it to go through all of this to crown a 2020 Stanley Cup champion or not- no matter what the league came up with, you weren’t going to get 100% agreement and acceptance. We’d rather have hockey than not, so that’s where we’ll leave it.

On another note- the statistical awards were made official yesterday too: The Bruins won their third President’s Trophy (1990, 2014) in franchise history with 100 points to lead the NHL when everything shut down. David Pastrnak was named co-recipient of the Rocket Richard Trophy as NHL’s top goal scorer along with Alex Ovechkin (48).  He just missed out on becoming the first Bruins 50-goal man since Cam Neely in 1994. Tuukka Rask and Jaroslav Halak took home the William Jennings Trophy, given to the goaltender(s) (25 games minium) with the fewest goals allowed, which used to be the Vezina Trophy criteria before the creation of the Jennings in 1982 as a necessity for the split of duties between two goalies and to allow for a subjective vote of one goaltender each year to receive top goalie honors. This is the third time a Bruins tandem has won the Jennings, joining Andy Moog-Reggie Lemelin (1990) and Tim Thomas-Manny Fernandez (2009). Rask and Chad Johnson just missed out on the Jennings to Jonathan Quick in 2014, but Rask did take home the Vezina hardware that year.

It’s a very superficial take on the news of the past 24 hours, but there it is.