Friday Five: What will the NHL look like next decade? What a decade it’s been. The 2010s brought the Golden Goal, a seventh Canadian club in Winnipeg, and a shot in the arm for franchises in Edmonton, Toronto and Vancouver with the arrivals of Connor McDavid, Auston Matthews and Elias Pettersson. What will the next decade bring the NHL?

Frank Seravalli TSN Senior Hockey Reporter Follow|Archive

What a decade it’s been. The 2010s brought the Golden Goal, a seventh Canadian club in Winnipeg, and a shot in the arm for franchises in Edmonton, Toronto and Vancouver with the arrivals of Connor McDavid, Auston Matthews and Elias Pettersson.

There was the first back-to-back Conn Smythe winner since Mario Lemieux in Sidney Crosby, followed by Alex Ovechkin helping the Washington Capitals hoist their first Stanley Cup - in a decade that witnessed the Los Angeles Kings and St. Louis Blues do the same.

Players found their voice on social media. They changed the way they eat, train and mentally prepare - some hiring personal coaches in each of those disciplines. The NHL changed how hits to the head would be disciplined, amended the playoff format and added a team in Vegas.

There was also the lockout-shortened 2012-13 campaign, the 2016 Stanley Cup playoffs without any Canadian teams, and hockey’s period of reckoning that dominated the close of 2019.

But instead of looking back, the Friday Five has its sights set on the future.

What will the next decade bring the NHL?

Here are five thoughts on what the NHL might look like by 2030:

1. What comes first: a European-born NHL head coach or the first female NHL on-ice official?

When Anton Lindholm suited up for the Colorado Avalanche on Wednesday, he set a record as the 100th Swede to skate in the NHL this season. Yet, for whatever reason, there has been no European-born and trained NHL head coach since Ivan Hlinka and Alpo Suhonen returned to Europe in the early 2000s.

There are many qualified coaches, from Finland’s Jukka Jalonen to Sweden’s Rikard Gronborg, who could make the jump.

“Well, based on working with professional players here, NHL players, top of the top and everything else, I’ve coached against upper-league players and I’ve done so successfully,” Gronborg told the Dreger Cafe in May. “I feel like I’m ready to do it [in the NHL] … At the end of the day, you need to keep producing and making sure people know that you can be successful with the concepts you bring into an organization.”

Meanwhile, NHL director of officials Stephen Walkom said the question is when and not if we’ll see a female referee at the game’s highest level. He said the NHL had a record 11 women on the ice at the league’s officiating combine last summer.

“I have no doubt it’s going to happen at some point,” Walkom said Friday. “We had four incredible women this year move on from the combine to referee NHL rookie tournaments in Buffalo, Nashville, Anaheim and Traverse City. That was a first.”

Walkom has kept a close eye on elite women’s hockey players, since his own daughters have played at some of the highest levels, and said he is constantly trying to recruit national team-level players to give officiating a try. He has pitched Team USA star Hilary Knight and spoke to all four women at the NHL’s All-Star Skills Competition last year.

“Our doors are open to any great athlete when their playing days are over,” Walkom said. “If you love being on the ice, love skating with the best players in the world, there is no better job in the world.”

2. Will there still be fighting in the NHL?

With such a dramatic drop in fighting this decade – from 714 fights in the 2009-10 season to a pace of 221 fights this season, on a calendar with 41 more regular-season games – it’s fair to wonder how much of a factor fisticuffs will be in 2029-30.

With more than 10 seasons’ worth of data, you could probably even mathematically pinpoint when it will be extinct.

At this current rate of decline, there are projected to be just 0.061 fights per game in 2029-30, with the help of our resident TSN analytics guru Travis Yost. That equates to just 80 fights per season.

Of course, the only way to qualitatively know whether fighting will still exist by the end of the next decade is to know whether the NHL decides to outlaw it in the rulebook.

That seems unlikely to happen, with the NHL instead tailoring the rules to increase speed and skill in the game the need for fighting and enforcers has naturally decreased on its own, removing the need to engage in a public battle with the game’s traditionalists or purists.

3. What impact will player and puck tracking have on the game?

The hockey world is about to get its hands on millions of data points that never existed, whenever the NHL finally introduces player and puck tracking technology. The NHL has committed to that rollout for the upcoming 2020 Stanley Cup playoffs, whether or not that comes to fruition remains to be seen. But it’s coming.

So what is the Holy Grail? What questions are the analytics community hoping to answer?

“I think it’s going to be accurately valuing players,” one Western Conference analyst said Friday. “Look at baseball and how data enabled them to accurately price players. All of the sudden, a few guys were making wild money and other guys were seeing their price collapse. That’s data driven.

“I look at Edmonton and they’re about to maybe pay [Zack] Kassian for playing with [Connor] McDavid. With better data, I think you’ll see teams accurately pricing players, which changes the pay system and creates all sorts of issues for the [NHLPA] that they don’t now have.”

4. Will the NHL expand beyond 32 teams?

After admitting Seattle as home to the 32nd franchise, the NHL raised eyebrows when Gary Bettman hinted that the league might not be stopping at 32.

Hey, disbursing a cheque for $650 million (approximately $856 million CAD) to 31 owners is a popular notion. It’s fair to wonder whether the next expansion fee could approach $1 billion, whenever the next round of expansion applications are circulated.

One prominent agent believes the next NHL expansion franchises won’t be in North America.

“I think by the end of the next decade, we’ll have two NHL franchises based in Europe,” said Allan Walsh of Octagon Hockey. “I think the NHL is exploring it, I think it’s on the agenda. I think in the same way that the NHL wanted to be the first to put down roots in Vegas, they want to be the first to put a stake in the ground in Europe. It’s just a matter of when, because I believe the league is looking for it to happen.”

For now, the NHL has focused on a series of one-off games or trips to Europe, to open the season or play a weekend set in November. That hasn’t generated much buzz or interest outside of those individual markets. But with league revenue slowly increasing, some believe the NHL might have to set its sights on Europe to really rake in the cash.

The intermediary step between a team based in Europe and these singular games? One idea: Sending over an entire division of teams at a time – say two weeks – and have them all play games against each other in different European cities. That may be the start.

5. By 2030, will the United States have passed Canada as a hockey power?

It depends how you answer that question. If it’s at the NHL Draft, then USA Hockey is already right there with Canada in terms of producing talent.

In 2016, Canada produced 37 more draftees than the U.S. That number shrunk to 27 in 2017, then 16 in 2018, down to a mere four in 2019, with 63 Canadians drafted compared to 59 Americans.

If it’s at the World Junior level, well, Team USA captured more gold medals (three) than Team Canada (two) over this past decade. Team USA also topped Team Canada for gold in the women’s game for the first time since 1998 at the last Olympics in PyeongChang in 2018.

The real answer to the question probably rests at the men’s best-on-best level. The last time Team USA won there was the 1996 World Cup of Hockey. Team Canada has won three straight competitions, in Sochi in 2014, Vancouver in 2010, and the 2016 World Cup of Hockey in Toronto.

The problem is that we don’t know when (if?) that next true measurement will come. Even in 2016 it wasn’t a true representation, with both sides losing top young players to Team North America. NHL participation in the 2022 Olympics in Beijing is dicey, and we’re virtually out of time to plan a 2021 World Cup-style event. That would make nearly a decade, from 2014 to 2022 or later, between real best-on-best competition.

That’s something we’re all craving over the next decade.

Contact Frank Seravalli on Twitter: @frank_seravalli​