I am going to be out of town on Saturday, so you'll actually be getting an extra day to finalize your rosters. Rosters for both NHL and AHL teams must be compliant to league rules no later than Sunday at 3pm ET.
You've seen how be the fines are for not being prepared before opening night. I still cannot understand how or why this has been in recent years despite weeks of free agency and preseason. Last season, two GMs were spared from being fired but the lack of proper roster management was dire enough that they were fined into bankruptcy. Don't do this! There are still teams who don't even have the minimum number of required players! Any GM who does not meet the appropriate roster criteria -or- does not have lineups properly set for both NHL and AHL teams, will face severe fines or potential termination.
Roster rules from this point are the same as described in the CBA: 13 forwards, 7 defensemen, and 2 goalies (with the option of one extra player) on your NHL roster and they are also minimums for your AHL roster. Remember that the simulator does NOT enforce these requirements, so it is up to you to make sure you are compliant! Just because you've set your rosters and lines for Game 1 does not mean that you have them set for Game 2.
This Saturday, the 27th, will count as a waiver processing day. If you lose any players to waivers on Friday or Saturday, you must account for this on your opening night roster. If you are positioned to win a waiver claim any of these next three days, they will count towards the 23-man roster. It all matters from here. Make room for winning claims on your opening night roster! Additionally and as always, ALL of your dressed skaters need to be in the main lineup!
I'm working on getting at least a basic regular season schedule posted tonight, with more tweaks tomorrow night. The entire schedule, especially the AHL schedule, will be in heavy flux over the next several weeks in order to adapt it to our calendar.
Speaking of our calendar, I want to find ways of making up for lost time. Crunching the schedule is just not going to be possible. The only way that I can think of is to do double-sims for a set period of time, which I HATE and we have never had to do during the regular season. I'll put this up to league vote once I have a better idea of how far our our season schedule brings us to.
I remind you to double-check that your captains are in order for this season. The sim always clears AHL captains during training camp. You guys have done a really good job of working on this throughout the preseason. Easily the most attention paid to leadership this early on!
Remember that this can have an effect on your team performance!As for what time Sunday's sim will take place, I do not know. I expect that I'll probably be back in town in the early afternoon. Then there will be full roster review and just making sure I have everything set as needed. I'll still aim for an 8pm ET sim time. If something really goes wrong with the schedule, I'll probably push the season start to Monday but that shouldn't be necessary.
I'm pretty excited to get going here. I hope you are as well! Let's start off hot, get some start-of-season articles out there, and please nobody get fined!