Vancouver Canucks fans just got one more reason to worry about next season, and this one has nothing to do with the roster.
Sleep doctor Pat Byrne raised the alarm this week on Sekeres and Price, and he did not hold back on how bad it looks.
"I've been doing this for 18 to 20 years across all the different leagues, and this is one of the biggest messes I've ever seen," Byrne said.
The root cause is British Columbia's move to permanent daylight saving time, which lines up awkwardly with the rest of the NHL's schedule.
For part of the season, Vancouver stays on the same clock as teams back east, cutting the usual three-hour gap down to nothing.
Then the rest of the league shifts its own clocks on March 14th, and the mismatch flips the other way for the stretch run.
By Byrne's count, roughly a third of Vancouver's games fall on the old schedule, with the other two-thirds falling under the new one.
It's one more obstacle for a team already rebuilding
Byrne says that kind of back-and-forth disrupts road trips and throws off the circadian rhythms players rely on to actually recover between games.
The timing could not be worse for a team already trying to answer bigger questions with its roster.
Vancouver finished dead last in the league this past season at 25-49-8, with a minus-100 goal differential to show for it.
The Canucks have already made real changes trying to fix that, hiring Manny Malhotra as head coach and bringing in Ryan Papaioannou to run the AHL club in Abbotsford.
A scheduling quirk will not undo any of that work, but it adds one more variable a rebuilding team did not ask for.
Byrne's full comments through Sekeres and Price lay out the scheduling mess in more detail.
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Fixing a roster is hard enough without also fighting the clock, and Vancouver now has to manage both at the same time.
Will Vancouver's messy schedule actually hurt the Canucks next season?
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