It seems that NHL commissioner Gary Bettman has a bone to pick with Chicago Blackhawks' general manager Stan Bowman. The reason?Ian Mitchell's contract. According to The Athletic's Michael Russo, Bettman isn't happy with Bowman and a couple of other GM's for signing a player on their ELC hoping to add them to their reserve list for the remainder of the suspended season. Mitchell like a couple of other prospects around the league were given contracts with no official start dates hoping that they could get in for the rest of the season. Russo adds that the NHL hasn't allowed the contracts with "To Be Determined" start dates to be approved and the league will force them all to resubmit the contracts with 2020-21 start dates. The beef here is that under a regular season, a team can usually sign a player at the end of the regular season and burn a year off the deal even if it's only for a couple of games, however the NHL warned teams no ELC's can be signed for the 2019-20 season because of the pandemic. Chicago, along with Florida, Montreal and St. Louis tried to create a loophole with deals starting with a TBD start date.
