It’s been an action-packed first half of September for the NHL, but most of the biggest stories have absolutely nothing to do with training camps opening across the league.

Instead, much of the focus has been on three franchise icons who each have worn only one NHL jersey — and the growing possibility they may at some point be prepared to try on others.

We have seen Kirill Kaprizov turn down the most lucrative AAV contract in league history — eight years at $16 million per season — sending an early scare into Minnesota Wild management and fans.

Then there’s the growing question over why Connor McDavid has yet to sign an extension with the Edmonton Oilers, including the captain’s vague answers about how he is going to proceed with free agency looming in nine months.

And, last week, even the once-unthinkable notion of Sidney Crosby potentially leaving the Pittsburgh Penguins, in his 21st season, gained steam after comments from his agent, Pat Brisson:

“Let’s put it this way, it’s always a possibility, you know?” Brisson told our Pierre LeBrun. “It’s been three years they haven’t made the playoffs. It all depends on how Sid is going to be and how the team is going to do. I maintain the same position that I do believe that he should be playing playoff hockey every year. In my opinion.”

If this is the new New NHL, sign us up. We’ve been waiting for more player movement chaos for many, many years.

When the NHL introduced the salary cap in 2005, it dramatically changed the typical career path of a top player. Today it’s not uncommon for a future franchise star to be drafted at 18; play on a three-year entry-level contract until 21 or 22, and then sign a max-term eight-year deal to take them into their 30s before one final legacy contract caps their career.

Add in a mandatory no-movement clause as early as contractually possible, and the result is a widespread phenomenon: A high percentage of this generation’s top players never change teams.

Consider that, in the past decade of the league, 10 of the NHL’s top 13 scorers have each played for just one team. Two of those who have switched locker rooms, Patrick Kane and Brad Marchand, only did so at the tail end of their careers, once the Blackhawks and Bruins were no longer competitive. The third is Artemi Panarin, the ultra-rare NHL star to suited up for three teams.

Over the past five years, this stasis at the top of the league appears to have solidified, as an incredible 20 of 26 players (77 percent) to average a point-a-game or better in that span have all spent their careers in one market entering this season.

Some fans might cheer that homogeneity. After all, it’s nice to have players who can be identified as meaning something extra special to a franchise. And in previous eras, there were the great stories about the Lemieuxs, Sakics and Yzermans standing out as franchise icons.

But in this case, what’s happening right now in the NHL feels like far too much of a good thing, something forced by the CBA more than a desirable outcome for the teams or players. Does every superstar need to stay with the same team for nearly two decades, even when it means playing out the string for a losing (or mediocre) cause? Does the captain really need to always go down with the ship, even when things are as hapless as they are in Pittsburgh?

Who exactly does that benefit?

All of these situations are obviously up to the individual players, and we do see stars bail in high-profile ways from time to time. (Exhibit A: Matthew Tkachuk going to Florida and winning two Stanley Cups.) But players also face unique pressure to stay with the only team they’ve ever known, and factors unique to hockey conspire to keep them in place far more than in other sports.

The fan uprising that occurred when John Tavares left the Islanders for the Maple Leafs in 2018, at least in part, arose from the fact that it’s simply so rare to see top NHL players walk to free agency.

Part of what separates the NHL from the NBA, where star movement is prevalent, is hockey’s longtime allowance of much longer contracts. With NHL revenues and salaries far lower than their NBA counterparts, and the chance of career-ending injuries higher for NHL stars, players and agents have often pushed for the simple security of a long-term deal, even if it means locking in your peak years with a middling organization.

It feels like that may be changing, however, with a rapidly rising salary cap and CBA changes — including lower term limits — helping drive a shift in star behavior.

In just the past 15 months, we’ve witnessed Steven Stamkos, Marchand and Mikko Rantanen all leave the organizations they were drafted by — Tampa Bay, Boston and Colorado, respectively — amid disputes that basically boiled down to wanting bigger pieces of the pie as the cap gets set to jump nearly 30 percent by 2027-28.

With Mitch Marner later leaving a toxic situation in Toronto to go to the Vegas Golden Knights, it’s likely that the NHL has experienced more star turnover in this brief window than at any other similar timeframe in its salary cap era.

If anything comes from the smoke around McDavid, Crosby and Kaprizov right now, that will only confirm that things really are shifting.

More star movement would be a positive for the NHL in a lot of ways, not the least of which is by giving more markets access to the sport’s biggest names in the sport. Huge trades and free agency sweepstakes obviously generate widespread fan interest, but having new challengers to established contenders is important, too. No one wants to see talent concentrated in the same places again and again.

The past handful of years, seven franchises (Florida, Tampa Bay, Vegas, Colorado, Dallas, Carolina and Edmonton) have enjoyed the bulk of the postseason success, making it more evident than ever that you need star power combined with adequate depth to win in the playoffs. If those top players were more freely available, however, it could shake up the league’s power balance more often, letting some of the also-rans get back in the race.

It could also allow GMs to try establishing their own super teams through methods other than a painful draft-based rebuild, which can take seven or eight years to pay off. (If it ever does.)

I don’t believe we’ll ever see player movement in the NHL to the extent that the NBA experiences, but that shouldn’t really be the goal. Freeing things up a little bit more, with shorter contracts, higher AAVs and fewer NMCs, is probably enough of a shift to help start that trend.

In the end, however, it’ll fall to the stars themselves — led by McDavid, Crosby and Kaprizov — to make a more emphatic change.

Here’s hoping they do.

(Top photos: Jamie Schwaberow and Codie McLachlan / Getty Images)