Agent: 'Doesn't make sense' for remaining UFAs to sign right now

With several talented unrestricted free agents still on the open market, one prominent player representative believes the recent lack of action is due to the NHL and NHLPA struggling to pull together a plan for the 2020-21 campaign.

"In early November teams were calling every day. Now it’s every other day," the anonymous agent told The Athletic's Thomas Drance. "They’re still indicating interest, but some of them are waiting. And some of it is us. We want to wait too.

"We want to see what develops out of this. At this point, it doesn’t make sense to do something until we know what things look like … If we wanted to have signed already, we could’ve done that. Then again, those teams we could’ve signed with haven’t done anything else yet either. It’s like a very long engagement, or like there’s 31 people at the dance, but there’s just no dance partners."

Some prominent names still available include perennial 30-goal threat Mike Hoffman, as well as Anthony Duclair, Andreas Athanasiou, Mikael Granlund, and Sami Vatanen.

The NHL remains hopeful of starting next season in early January, but a lack of recent progress has brought on plenty of speculation.

Commissioner Gary Bettman addressed the situation on Wednesday, refuting reports that the league is trying to swindle the players into renegotiating the CBA that was agreed upon by both sides prior to the return to play in August.