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Face it: Notwithstanding all those Philadelphia Flyers suspensions early in the season and the pesky matter of William (Boots) Del Biaggio trying to buy the Nashville Predators with someone else's money, the 2007-08 season proved to be a respectable one for the NHL.

It saw the emergence of Alexander Ovechkin as the most valuable player, in a year when a high ankle sprain limited Sidney Crosby to 53 regular-season games.

Crosby's Pittsburgh Penguins made a stirring playoff run, advancing to the Stanley Cup final against the Detroit Red Wings, only two years removed from a dismal 58-point season. The Red Wings, who went wire-to-wire in the regular season, cruised to the championship, with skill and verve — and along the way, buried all those stereotypes that you can't win with Europeans.

The Montreal Canadiens came to life and were the only Canadian-based team left standing after the first playoff round. Even the soap opera that was the Toronto Maple Leafs proved entertaining in a train-wreck sort of way.

So now, after a 111-day off-season, training camps for the 2008-09 season are about to get under way. The four teams that will open the season in Europe in the fall (Pittsburgh, the Ottawa Senators, New York Rangers and Tampa Bay Lightning) will start early next week; the rest of the league will follow on Friday. What's new? What's worth monitoring? Lots, but no storylines are more compelling than these 10.

1. The Lightning soap opera. Not since the days of Harold Ballard has an ownership group so captivated the NHL as those two wild and craaaaazy guys in Tampa, Oren Koules and Len Barrie. In less than six months on the job, they're more well-known than two dozen of the corporate types who own the other teams in the league. The Lightning committed almost $200-million (all currency U.S.) in salaries to players over the summer, half of it to new guys, in a spending spree that would make even George Steinbrenner blush. Will it pay off? Who knows? But it'll sure be fun to watch and the best news is that, after finishing 30th in the league, there is only way go anyway — and that's up.

2. All Montreal, all the time. In this, the 100th anniversary of the storied Canadiens franchise, the bars and bistros of Montreal will do a booming season-long business, as reporters descend for the all-star game, the Patrick Roy retirement ceremony, the entry draft and the as-yet-to-be announced outdoor game at the Big Owe. And if the Canadiens' surge last season, from 10th in the conference to first place, is no mirage, there may even be a playoff round or four. No Canadian-based team has won the Stanley Cup since the Canadiens' miracle run of 1993; in this historic season for the franchise, maybe the karma will be right again.

3. The Alex and Sid Show. In the same way that Magic and Larry Bird revitalized the NBA all those years ago, the NHL could not have hoped for a better marketing punch than the one Ovechkin and Crosby provide. They entered the league just three years ago, and ever since have been duelling in a how-do-you-solve-a-problem-like-Maria sort of way. You know: "Anything you can do, I can do better." Each has won an MVP award already; Crosby took his team to the playoffs in each of the past two years; the Washington Capitals dramatically rode Ovechkin's coattails to the postseason last season after a dismal start. The good news: Crosby is only 21; Ovechkin will turn 23 on Wednesday. You'd have to think the best is still to come.

4. The effect of Crazy Money. The lockout of 2004-05 was supposed to rein in NHL spending on player salaries; and it did, for about a week in the summer of 2005. Ever since, though, any player with desirable credentials prepared to test unrestricted free agency has been rewarded with staggering sums of money (see Brian Campbell and Wade Redden for the most recent examples). The net result is two-fold: Six clubs are currently over the $56.7-million salary cap, which has jumped more than $17-million in four years — and all six will need to get their payrolls in line before rosters are completed in early October. Moreover, the spending spree means some experienced journeymen are in limbo without a contract (Martin Gelinas and Mark Parrish) or will attend training camps without a contract (Bryan Berard and Jeff O'Neill), trying to find honest work.

5. The Windy City revival. Out of the playoffs for nine of the past 10 seasons, the Chicago Blackhawks did a thorough house-cleaning job last year, getting rid of deadwood such as Bob Pulford and letting charismatic Dale Tallon run the show. For their renewed efforts, the Blackhawks received the outdoor game this season. They can build around two really good young talents: Jonathan Toews (the new captain) and Patrick Kane. There's also an interesting question mark in Martin Havlat, a potential goaltender conflict with Cristobal Huet and Nikolai Khabibulin and an excitable young head coach in Denis Savard, who seems to be doing a better job than just about anyone thought he might. Unbelievably, there were actual warm bodies spotted at the United Center last season, watching the Blackhawks play, for the first time in eons. From a league perspective, a healthy, prosperous, big-market pre-expansion team back from the dead can only be a major positive, provided the Blackhawks can continue their Lazarus-like resurrection.

6. The CHL effect. The CHL is Russia's Continental Hockey League, funded — in some markets anyway — by wealthy and ambitious oil men, which landed one big fish in Jaromir Jagr and poached a medium-sized keeper in Alexander Radulov, formerly of the Nashville Predators. If all the CHL does is woo away the Ladislav Nagys and John Grahames and Chris Simons — players who've run out of NHL options — then it isn't going to pose much of a threat. If it ups the ante in years to come — and the two leagues continue to adopt a Cold War-style of diplomacy with one another — the competition for players could get interesting.

7. The Year Of The Shark. Long a model of fiscal responsibility (their cap figure of $41.5-million last year was in the bottom five in the NHL), the San Jose Sharks finally threw caution to wind this summer, hiring a new coach (former Red Wings assistant Todd McLellan) and adding two new faces on the blueline, Dan Boyle and Rob Blake, all of whom bring tangible Stanley Cup experience to the mix. The Sharks have won at least one playoff round in each of the past four seasons; no other team in the league can boast that accomplishment. The goal this season is to win four rounds for the first time; it begins in camp as they integrate new bodies, in a new system that makes them a seductive early-season championship pick.

8. Whither Mats Sundin? On the basis of column inches and trees felled in pursuit of a story that hardly ever changed, the resolution of the daytime drama As The Swede Dithers will come as a blessing and a relief — a blessing to the team that lands Sundin, assuming he ever plays again; and a relief to anyone who has had to chronicle in painful detail the trials and tribulations of the former Leafs captain.

9. The Stanley Cup hangover. Real or imagined? For the past few years, teams that have gone deep in the playoffs one year have either missed them entirely the next or lost in the first round. It happened to the Anaheim Ducks last season and the Carolina Hurricanes the season before. The last team to win back-to-back championships was the Red Wings of 1997 and '98 — and believe it or not, there are enough holdovers from that era (GM Ken Holland, team captain Nicklas Lidstrom, Kris Draper, Chris Osgood, Tomas Holmstrom and others), which suggests if anyone can figure it out, they can.

10. Woe Canada? Only three of the six Canadian teams made the playoffs last season, and two — the Calgary Flames and Ottawa Senators — spent a good deal of the summer shuffling pieces in and out, but not necessarily making any dramatic strides, at least on paper, that would make them a lock for the next postseason again. And while the Edmonton Eskimos appear to be turning the corner, there is no way of forecasting whether that will happen this season, next season or some time down the road. Vancouver has scoring issues, and Toronto is, well, Toronto. There is a pleasing unpredictability to the post-lockout NHL, where teams can go from first to 10th place (Buffalo) and 10th to first (Montreal) in one year. Still, imagining that one of the six Canadian teams can bump Detroit off its pedestal requires exactly that — a wishful imagination.