The Quebec Major Junior Hockey League’s holiday break is always a time for teams and their fans to catch their collective breath. All of the teams are, by the time the games are finished for the unofficial first half of the season, past the official halfway mark, and have fewer games remaining than they’ve already played.

The break allows the players and team staff to return home to be with family, to talk about the great things — and the not-so-great-things — that have happened to date during the hockey season, and to take a break from the grueling schedule and grind of the game.

But while the players rest, the general managers and fan bases of each team go to work. The former work on potential player transactions, trying to set the team up either for the remainder of this season, for next season and beyond, or both.

The latter go to work speculating on those possible deals.

This year, Lewiston GM Roger Shannon said the landscape of the league, with the divisional realignment, has changed enough, and the Maineiacs have changed enough in the past year themselves that the team’s outlook on the mid-season trade period is, well, boring.

“The realignment of the divisions has changed the way people are approaching things,” Shannon said. “It used to be, you could look at the first round if you were winning your division, and basically guarantee you’d win the first round. So the moves you’d make, maybe you make one or two moves without touching your core and you coule win three rounds. Now that it’s one through 16, it’s a totally different approach. When it’s all said and done, it’s totally irrelevant that we’re in a division with Quebec and Victoriaville and so on, because we could, hypothetically, play outside of the division the whole playoffs.”

Any moves the Maineiacs do make, Shannon said, will do little or nothing to disturb the team’s core group of players, younger or older.

“Why would we do something that might set the organization back three or four more years?” Shannon said. “That in itself, there are teams that have made so many moves at Christmas time, no matter what they do, it takes so long to rebuild. With the last couple of years being the way they’ve been, and finishing 16th two years in a row, it just wasn’t a lot of fun. It wasn’t good for the front office that’s trying to build a marketing plan, it’s not good for the players, it’s not good for the first-rounders. We finally have got the team, talent-wise, to where we want to be, so we aren’t about to go rippin’ her apart for the sake of, ‘Oh, we have to do this in order to compete with these guys.'”

The Maineiacs have finished the unofficial first half of the season with a record of 24-13-0-2, good for 50 points and second place in the Telus East division. They’ve played the teams above them in the standings — Quebec, Montreal and Saint John — tougher than most. But Shannon, while not necessarily balking at making a move or two, said the approach this year is that of caution.

“If there is such a thing as conservative, this is the most conservative I’ve felt going into a trading period,” Shannon said. “We’ve got a good team, we’ve got a good product. It’s pleasing the fans of the L/A area, and I don’t want to tinker too much with it. I want the fans to come to the rink and know the kids after Christmas, and know that the kids are going to be there competing hard every night.”

A few rumors have surfaced, as they typically do this time of year, involving potential Lewiston deals. One involves adding a high-end defenseman. The other involves trading an impact forward this Christmas, with the return of a player or two either immediately, or at the league draft in June.

“Those are great-sounding deals,” Shannon said, “but not something I can see happening. As we speak, a lot of players I am sure are being brought up in discussions with other teams. But nothing like that has been done, and I think, although they sound like good deals, and they sound like something I’d be very interested in doing, I don’t want to do anything to this group. We’re just not looking at that right now. We’re not looking at deals that are similar to what we were a year ago.

“If we had to part with players,” Shannon conceded, “it’s going to be a lot easier to part with a forward than it is a defenseman, because we don’t have enough defensemen right now. Unless I’m parting with a defenseman and getting one or two of them back, then all I am is staying at the surface of the water.”

The team, meanwhile, continues to enjoy solid chemistry on and off the ice.

“I’ve never seen a team that I’ve been a part of, maybe a few of the college teams over the years, that has such good chemistry,” Shannon said. “By this time of the year, I’ve usually had five or six incidents involving players not getting along with other players. They live with each other 24/7 almost. They live together, they’re on the bus, in hotels. There’s going to be issues. And this group, and it comes from the leaders on this team, this group gets along remarkable, and it shows on the ice.”

“The core guys we have here, the core leaders, are strong enough to respond to any problem or change that would arise, either gaining someone or someone leaving,” coach J.F. Houle added. “They’re mature enough and strong enough as leaders.”

That said, Houle also believes the team’s thin blue line corps needs another body or two.

“We do need another defenseman,” Houle said without missing a beat. “We need a seventh defenseman. It helps in practice, in case of an injury, we need to find another defenseman.”

Aside from that need, though, Houle said he believes in the team just the way it is.

“I like these kids, and sometimes, the less you do, the better it is,” Houle said. “It all depends on what we decide, but sometimes, doing nothing is just as good as doing something.”

Teams are allowed to trade roster players beginning Sunday. The deadline to complete trades this year in the QMJHL is the second weekend of January.