Tim Benz: The NHL's return to play address wasn't a plan. It was more of an update.

When NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman made his return to play announcement Tuesday, was I the only one who walked away feeling like Clark W. Griswold in “Christmas Vacation”?

Many of us were expecting details, dates, locations and playoff systems.

Instead, we got a subscription to the “Jelly of the Month” club.

Yeah. A lot of buildup. With very few results.

NHL.com is using the phrase “plan” to describe what Bettman announced yesterday. That was much less a “plan” and little more than an “update.”

Emphasis on “little.”

I’m not going to crucify the commissioner over this, though. If he had more answers, he’d give them to us. He’s in a tough spot.

But let’s not pretend we are all that much closer to the resumption of hockey than we were at the start of Memorial Day weekend.

Because with so little commitment being made to times, dates and hub cities, it strikes me that there is still plenty of wiggle room for this whole effort to fall apart.

It doesn’t sound like much — if anything — has been signed, sealed and approved yet. So the owners, players, networks and potential destinations can still scrub any verbal deal they have as of now.

Here’s what we do know coming off of Bettman’s latest information drip.

• The 2019-20 regular season is over. The Stanley Cup Playoffs will include 24 teams.

• The tournament will begin with a 16-team, eight-series qualifying round with teams Nos. 5-12 (seeded based on percentage of points gained in the regular season) in each conference. Meanwhile, a round-robin competition among the top four teams will determine seeding for the first round.

Not regular-season points or points percentage.

So that means, yes, the Penguins would get the Montreal Canadiens in the first round.

• The bottom seven teams that did not qualify will be part of a draft system so complicated a military supercomputer could crash trying to process it. There are even “placeholders” involved, for teams that lose in the first round of the playoffs.

Unless “Placeholders” is the name of the new Seattle expansion franchise. I may have misunderstood that.

• Training camps won’t open before July 1.

• The Conference Finals and Stanley Cup Final will be best-of-seven series.

• This revamped schedule could likely go into October.

Here’s what we don’t know.

• Where the games will be played. Although we do know Pittsburgh is one of the 10 finalists to be a hub.

To be clear, Pittsburgh is *being considered* as a hub city: pic.twitter.com/roPfNFQr0m

— Seth Rorabaugh (@SethRorabaugh) May 26, 2020

That’s assuming the governor gets us to (and keeps us in) the green zone, and the mayor doesn’t dump sand outside of PPG Paints Arena.

• Whether the hub cities will both be in Canada.

One there and one in the U.S.? One east, one west? Both in one half of either country? Who knows?

• How long the first two rounds of the playoffs will be. Either best-of-five or best-of-seven.

• Whether the remaining playoff tree will be a bracket system or reseeded after each round.

• Whether the Penguins keep the draft pick spent for Jason Zucker in 2020 and wait to pay the Minnesota Wild until 2021.

We think it’s still up for grabs based on if the Penguins lose to Montreal in the first round.

8 clubs eliminated in qualifying round will enter the draft lottery, so if the #Penguins lose to the #Canadiens in the play-in, Pens' first-rounder sent to #mnwild for Jason Zucker is lottery protected and could be deferred to 2021

— Michael Russo (@RussoHockey) May 26, 2020

Aside from all that, are we clear?

Crystal.

In this week’s hockey podcast, Penguins Radio Network host Brian Metzer joins me to surf through some of these questions. We try to interpret some of the answers. And we wonder how optimistic we should still be that the NHL can pull this off.

LISTEN: Tim Benz, Brian Metzer break down NHL’s potential return to play format