Two Refs Are Here To Stay

NHL teams

"Our view all along was we wanted to do this in stages, so we could do a phase-in in terms of getting the officials up to speed and getting them experience in a more controlled way," NHL commissioner Gary Bettman said. "Next year it will be 100 percent."

The league also postponed discussion of whether to have their players in the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics. Issues remail to be resolved and the NHL doesn't want to shut down for two weeks as it did for the 1998 Nagano Games.

No to All-Conference schedule
The NHL will continue to have interconference games in the near future. There had been rumors that to cut traveling costs, the league would stop to have teams in Eastern and Western Conferences play against each other.

"We had a brief discussion and overwhelmingly the board's view was there's no point in discussing the elimination of interconference games," Bettman said. "I took an informal poll ... it's really a nonissue."