(no subject)

[olivermoss]

* Babygirl has been sent back down to the AHL. I would be distraught, but I doubt he'll be there long.

* There is a team-building aspect to hockey, the inter-league weirdness and contracts that I am not looking into right now. There is a lot to the sport and I am trying to take a balanced approach... except when it comes to arena conversion videos. I will watch footage of areas switching back and forth between rink mode endlessly.

But, it is weird to me that Canada, who are so serious about player development, pretty much force NHL teams to roster Canadian draftees early or lose them to their juniors teams. And sometimes that means keeping then on the NHL roster and just scratching them every night, so no ice time. Top Canadian talent don't get a stepping stone between juniors and NHL the way other prospects do. We need to either not play them while they train and bulk up with no real play, or let them be penalty bait. We've gotten goals off of how hard other teams go after our youngest player, but that's not great.

Comments

[rekishi]

Yeah, they sometimes just need to leave them in juniors a bit longer. I know it used to be a thing back in the day (jesus I sound old, like, back in the day of 2010) that kids stayed with their junior teams for another year or so unless the NHL called dibs early. But that was usually really just the top talent rookies of the Sid Crosby, Jeff Skinner variant (I'm not counting the Russians here, who usually play professional hockey earlier or are just rostered between a club's junior and KHL division).

I assume this is a Hockey Canada thing?

Arena conversion is fun!!

[olivermoss]

Yeah, Canadian prospects can't be put on our own AHL teams until they age out of juniors. Our strongest rookie would be pulled to a very weak juniors team if we take him off the roster. Keeping him means he can at least train with the team, but that also means taking up a spot.

It's better now that he's had time to put on some weight, but he started the season a scrawny teenager.

I don't know if other countries have restrictions like that, but it feels like a weird position to put developing players in.

[rekishi]

I know that the OHL at least has a lot of...opinions on what to do with their players. I do understand, to an extent, because they want to prevent that their players end up wiling away in an AHL team when they could get top line minutes in juniors where they would be measured against their own age group. But it probably leads to more situations like this than they intend.

I think the USHL has similar stipulations.

The Russians don't really have that but since Russia at least has compulsory military service that does put a certain restriction there. They can be released early but that seems to have dwindled since the memorandum of understanding is not in force anymore. (I don't know the details of that either, I just know it existed.)

[olivermoss]

In this case it's a WHL team. Juniors might be better for some prospects, but IDK, I am new to hockey. The idea of having players jump directly from a juniors team to playing in the NHL seems a bit nuts to me.

I know that they don't want all the talent pulled from the Juniors teams because then those teams would be weaker. It's always a trade off. The whole leagues system is a confusing mess.

[rekishi]

But I've also been gone from hockey too long to speak about recent developments, but both the WHL and the OHL used to be really good at developing talent (like, I think the Kitchener Rangers alone have brought along Jeff Skinner, Grabriel Landeskog (who, yes, is not Canadian) and Mike Richards among others, those are just names I know off the top of my head). Like a LOT of guys have a stint in the OHL and come up quickly (Subban, Stammers, Weber etc) directly from there. Heck, even Crosby had a brief stint in the Q. The college route is the actually less travelled one, which I would personally like to see explored more.

But 18 is....really young to play in a league with some of the very big boys.

But as you see with the names above, all of those are the top of the line picks that make their NHL team right away. I would not ask that of a kid (any kid, really) but even less of a second or later round pick. And again, the NHL and Juniors fighting on the backs of players is really shitty for a variety of reasons but also because these guys are barely adults.

Meh.

[olivermoss]

It might depend on the team. Portland has the Winterhawks which are apparently a very important Canadian Juniors team. Cat would be sent to Spokane's team which... isn't. I haven't looked into it deeply, but I am fairly sure that the level of coaching, training and even access to training facilities are not anywhere close.

I don't have a ton of context on all of this yet. When I found out that our local team is a Canadian juniors team I was so confused.

[rekishi]

I really only know stuff about the OHL (and even then Not A Lot), I know the Q exists because Crosby and Letang played there and I know the WHL and USHL as well as the collegiate system exist...but that's pretty much it. It used to be, idk if that's still the case, after the draft the rookies could stay for 9 games with their NHL team to basically test drive them if they were ready. Else they'd go back to Juniors. With the 10th game, the kids would need to stay up and could not actually be sent to the AHL that year.

But all of that is information a decade out of date and hockey Canada has a tendency to change stuff

[muccamukk]

How Hockey Canada treats young men makes me want to throw myself into the sea.

[olivermoss]

Yeah, there is a lot more going on there than I am aware of. What affects the Kraken are most of my window into everything hockey