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Met with Paul Kelly this past week and was again struck by the impression that he is the right man at the right time to lead the NHL Players' Association.

Kelly replaced Ted Saskin, who replaced Bob Goodenow at the head of what was a fractured, divided organization coming out of the 2004-05 NHL lockout. To the NHLPA's ever-lasting credit, it took a long, hard look at a list of possible replacements and didn't feel compelled to draw a warm body from the ranks of the hockey establishment before finally settling on Kelly, who has been at the helm for going on a year now.

In that time, the former Boston prosecutor has done a commendable job of emphasizing process above all else, a commitment to doing things the right way that the NHLPA badly needed.

For example, a number of general managers have been muttering about their unhappiness with the NHLPA for not unilaterally extending the current collective bargaining agreement last spring, on the grounds that it would have made signing veteran players easier because teams could then could defer bonus payments into next year's cap, as they've done throughout the current agreement.

Most people think that's what will eventually happen; that the players have made out far better than expected in the current agreement and have no appetite to go to war with the owners only four years after losing an entire year out of their careers to a work stoppage.

But rather than just assuming that's how his membership felt, Kelly wanted to know the answer for sure. As a result, he is currently on his fall tour of NHL teams which brought him to Calgary last Tuesday, the eighth city that he's visited thus far. At every stop on the tour, Kelly and Glenn Healy, the NHLPA's new director of player affairs, are surveying players about their CBA intentions through a secret ballot. They then seal the results and file them away at NHLPA, until such time as all 30 teams are surveyed. They themselves don't know how the membership is leaning - and that's deliberately done, so as not to prejudice their own presentations, pro and con, about extending – or terminating the CBA.

The fall tour will wrap up on Dec. 17. By the time they report the results to the executive committee and vet them through some of their financial people, the earliest they would communicate their desires will be mid-January. Officially, they have until May to let the league know their intentions.

Perhaps more importantly, Kelly and Healy are also addressing safety issues on their tour - an increasingly fractious topic at all levels of the NHL, given the number of players who were sidelined in the first month of the season as a result of concussions.

Healy, a rising star in the association after leaving his TSN broadcasting role, is taking a significant lead role in this discussion, especially as it relates to equipment. Healy suggested that of the 65 concussions suffered in the league last year, 39 were the result of shoulder pad-to-head contact. As a result, the NHLPA is working with the equipment manufacturers to eliminate the hard shell on the shoulder pad, which – while it has done a good job of protecting shoulders – has contributed to the frequency of head injuries. Modifications to the elbow pads have made them safer; Healy believes it wouldn't take much to adjust the manufacture of the shoulder pad to accomplish the same thing. They are also looking at innovations in helmet design.

Kelly also believes that a small percentage of players are responsible for a disproportionate share of the truly dirty plays that occur every year in the league; and that his association will support the NHL disciplinary process, if they determine to throw the book at repeat offenders.

This, too, is something of a departure. In the past, it always seemed as if the NHLPA was busier trying to protect the interests of the perpetrator of a questionable incident, as opposed to the injured party. In his presentation, Healy is showing players a video, not of don'ts, but of dos – in other words, ways they can play the body without necessarily pile-driving an opponent, between the numbers, from behind, six feet away from the boards.

Smart.

And since the players and owners are theoretically “partners” under the current CBA, there is no reason why Kelly shouldn't have a voice in relocation and/or expansion talk as well. This week, Kelly reiterated a point that he's made in the past – that southern Ontario could support a second NHL franchise (and probably a third as well) – and should be in the mix, if and when some of the weaker American teams (especially the ones sucking money out of the revenue-sharing pool) can't make it in their current markets. The goal, after all, for both players and owners is to maximize revenue – and a second team, in southern Ontario, in Toronto, Hamilton or elsewhere, would be a license to print money.

It's a reasonable position. The Maple Leafs are not actively opposing at least the theory of a second team in Toronto; somebody (besides me, on a long-time soap box) needs to start carrying the ball for the concept. Just because it makes so much sense is no reason for the NHL to dismiss it completely out of hand.

HHOF WEEKEND: On Monday, the Hockey Hall Of Fame will induct four new members – players Glenn Anderson and Igor Larionov; builder Ed Chynoweth; and linesman Ray Scapinello. In addition, it will also honour Neil Stevens, the distinguished former Canadian Press correspondent, with the Elmer Ferguson award for contributions to print journalism; and the venerable play-by-play man Mike (Doc) Emrick, with the Foster Hewitt award, for his contributions to hockey broadcasting.

Discussing the merits of a players' candidacy is one of the most popular debates, it would seem, based on e-mail traffic. Some want it to be purely a discussion of numbers; as if statistics alone could measure the flesh-and-blood contribution of a player.

Jim Nill, the Detroit Red Wings' VP and assistant GM, played with Anderson on the 1980 Canadian Olympic team and later as an NHL opponent. He and just about everyone who played with or against Anderson made the same essential point this past week: That measuring his career strictly on the basis of points undersells the qualities Anderson brought to the table – not just his scoring ability, but his physical play and his ability to rise to the occasion. Some players get overwhelmed in the moment; in fact, lots do.

Anderson never did, something Nill came to appreciate the year they spent playing together at the start of their respective careers. Anderson had joined the men's Olympic hockey program from the University of Denver, Nill from the University of Calgary.

Canada was just returning to Olympic competition that year after a 12-year absence to protest the former Eastern Bloc's so-called amateurs that were permitted to compete by the IOC. Money was tight, so all the players – recruited mostly from the U.S. and Canadian college ranks – lived in a oil-rig barracks, affectionately known as Rig 80, which was loaned to the national team to house their athletes. The players shared one telephone – a payphone no less - received a paltry living allowance, and mostly played for the love of the game, and the desire to wear a Canadian jersey.

“It was oil rig trailers, put together in a compound,” Nill was remembering this week. “You lived with another guy; you both had your bunks. It was a college dorm-like atmosphere, with one big bathroom area. It helped bring the guys together. We were all college or -junior guys, so it wasn't as if we were a bunch of pros, used to living in big condos.

“It was just a place to sleep; that's all we needed. We didn't know any different.”

Anderson said his year with the Olympic team jump-started his career, largely because of the intense training they did during a limited playing schedule.

“To be an Olympic athlete at that time as an amateur, which they had, was absolutely phenomenal,” said Anderson. “Four hours of ice time a day - from 7:00 a.m. in the morning till 8:00 p.m. at night we were on the ice or off the ice, doing some kind of mental preparation, system-wise or training-wise.

“Whatever energy I had at the end of the day was basically Father (David) Bauer's philosophy – I was always summoned over to the monastery there in Calgary by the 4H club and we had endless conversations about more of the human spirit and the political end of it and that the North American league is not the only league; there's other options. If you don't happen to make it, you can fall back on schooling.

“He really opened my eyes to the broader picture.”

As a player, Nill found Anderson fearless on the ice.

“People don't understand the physical part of his game,” said Nill. “In the tournament before the Olympics, he hit (Valeri) Kharlamov so hard, he just about killed the guy. A lot of times skilled players don't have that edge; he did.”

And the bigger game, the better Anderson's performance.

“If there was a game on the line, you wanted Glenn Anderson on the ice,” said Nill. “A lot of people don't really know Glennie. He was a happy-to-go lucky guy, but as soon as he got to the room and it was time for him to play, there wasn't a more competitive guy on the ice.

“He was going to score; he was going to go through you; his trademark was cutting to the net with his leg out, cutting around the defenceman, going to the net.

“He was a Mark Messier when it came to finishing a game off.”

THIS AND THAT: Deliberations for the HHOF's class of 2009 will not take place until next June, but it promises to be another class of top-heavy prospects, including Steve Yzerman, Brett Hull, Luc Robitaille and Brian Leetch … The injury-bug bitten Carolina Hurricanes activated right winger Scott Walker from injured reserve this past week. Walker missed the first 11 games of the season, after needing surgery to repair ligament damage in his left hand, injured during a fight in the exhibition season. He scored in his first game back, the 3-2 loss to Washington … Always thought Bryan McCabe would flourish this season with the Florida Panthers, but then he injured his back in the season opener and has been out ever since. He returned to action Thursday night, and should help the Panthers' power-play … Florida has lost five in a row now, the latest against a Los Angeles Kings' team that won for the first time after five losses in a row. But no team has been streakier this year than Colorado, where the Avalanche opened the season with three consecutive losses, then won five in a row, and now have lost five in a row, after Thursday's defeat to the Minnesota Wild. Incidentally, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune reported afterwards that Avalanche winger Darcy Tucker threatened to take out Wild defenceman Nick Schultz at the knees and then followed through. That, at least, was Schultz's view of the matter. “My concern is at the end of the second, he tells me he's going to come and take out my knees, and then he actually does it,” Schultz said. “It says everything you need to know about that guy. He's been that type of player his whole career, and you don't need that in the game. It's something we're trying to get away from — hits to the head and taking out guys knees. It's just a gutless play.” Tucker was unavailable for comment after Schultz levied his charge, having already completed his media availability. Colorado's losing streak, meanwhile, was its longest in 10 years – dating back to March and April of 1998, when the Avs six in a row … Hard on the heels of the smallest crowd in the history of the Columbus Blue Jackets, which occurred last week, the Kings announced a crowd of 11,267 for the game against the Panthers, which the Los Angeles Times suggested was the smallest to attend a Kings game since the team moved to the Staples Center at the start of the 1999-2000 season … Barry Trotz, the one-and-only coach of the Nashville Predators, became just the 10th man in history to spend 750 games behind the bench of the same NHL team. On a swing through Western Canada this past week, Trotz said that he'd been blessed with a general manager (David Poile) who “believes in what we were doing as a coaching staff and (in) myself particularly. That's allowed us to get through a lot of the hard times. I think in this business we don't allow some of the people to get through hard times.”

AND FINALLY: Kelly confirmed that the NHLPA did file an unfair labour practices charge against the NHL with the National Labor Relations Board over the complicated issue of European players and their so-called “defected” player status. Under the old CBA, NHL teams owned the rights to European players virtually in perpetuity. That was significantly different from players drafted out of the North American leagues, where teams had a window to sign them – and if they couldn't, they either went back into the draft or became free agents.

The NHL negotiated away with defected player status in the last CBA, making all players – Europeans and North Americans – subject to the same basic criteria. However, in the absence of a transfer agreement with the International Ice Hockey Federation, the NHL won an arbitration case, re-introducing the defected player clause until such time as they can get a new deal with the IIHF. Given the chilly state of relations between the NHL and Russia, it is unclear when that could happen.

In the meantime, the players association hopes to get a favourable ruling from the NLRB on the matter – although the latter body isn't known to work at the speed of light either. It'll be a test to see which comes through first – a verdict from the NLRB or a new transfer agreement with the IIHF.