Quick thoughts on NHL prospect tournaments and best-on-best competition
Also, an NHL in-season tournament is not worth pursuing.
Fair warning, this piece is going to ramble.
Dates and details are starting to officially come out for NHL pre-season prospect tournaments/showcases in mid-September.
With some slight deviation, most teams will have their prospects playing between Sept. 14-17. The Buffalo Sabres now host the largest tournament, with six teams, at the Harborcenter.
The Traverse City tournament the Detroit Red Wings hosted used to be the gold standard. It was launched in 1998 with four teams, eventually grew to an eight-team tournament, and has now shrunk back to it’s original size for 2023 with four teams — Detroit, Dallas Stars, Toronto Maple Leafs, and Columbus Blue Jackets, the first game will be Sept. 14.
The Traverse City tournament is a victim of its own success.
Other teams, like the Minnesota Wild and Chicago Blackhawks, saw the Red Wings were able to use it as a marketing event and further reach out to fans outside of metro Detroit. Others focused on the price and geography, Traverse City isn’t easy to get to, and the tournament started to shrink with the help of COVID-related budget assessments — it’s much cheaper, for example, for the Carolina Hurricanes to participate in a prospect tournament closer to home than northern Michigan.
CentreIce arena in Traverse City, with all due respect, also doesn’t offer the modern amenities that the Sabres are able to offer at the Harborcenter, which allowed Buffalo to pull some teams that Detroit would have courted in the past.
While selfishly it was great when the Traverse City tournament was in it’s heyday — you could watch eight prospect pools in a single day! — truthfully it was too much hockey. Each team played four games in five days, both had two back-to-backs and that final game — aside from the championship — was often a nothing-burger of a contest for all involved.
With Traverse City moving to three games per team, the product should be slightly improved and, honestly, removing a “champion” won’t hurt whether players try or not.
The regional aspect also works well. And, honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised if in the not-to-distant future the Stars would look into bringing a prospect tournament to their practice facility in Frisco (this would be after Jim Nill’s tenure in Dallas, he’s extremely loyal to the Traverse City tournament he helped start with Ken Holland.)
This semi-connects to social media chatter I’ve seen about the NHL and experimenting with some NBA-style things, including a proper summer league or an in-season tournament.
I think both would be a mistake and devalue the NHL’s product.
To be clear, I’m all for fun and outside-the-box thinking, I personally would love to see pseudo promotion-relegation system (which I expanded on in link below), but both a summer league and in-season tournament wouldn’t have the desired effect.
One of the draws of NBA Summer League, beyond the games, is the entire league setting up shop in one city and the ensuing NBA Summit where the future of the league can be altered.
The NHL already has it’s own summer summit, it’s the only league where the draft is like this, and NHL player movement isn’t very exciting. The league has too many no-movement clauses for that to be plausible, and players often lack the gumption to really push for their own cause, like they do in the NBA.
In theory an NHL summer league would be broadcast on NHL Network, like the NBA Summer League on NBATV, but aside from providing programming for a channel most people can’t get, I don’t see much benefit of an NHL summer league and I don’t see how it would grow the game.
I also don’t think an in-season tournament or competition running parallel to the NHL regular season will grow the game.
The allure of in-season and parallel competitions in international soccer, and I think the NBA is missing the mark on this, too, is both financial and novel. Cup competitions, both domestic and continent-wide, create matchups that otherwise don’t exist and new TV opportunities lead to further financial paydays.
The NHL is also such a Stanley Cup-driven league. If no one cares who wins the President’s Trophy, why would anyone care about an internal secondary tournament?
Whether it’s going back to the Olympics, or creating their own best-on-best tournament, one of hockey’s biggest shortcomings is the lack of true top international competition.
There are socio-economic factors that make things difficult with Russia, and as long as the invasion is ongoing they should be banned from the IIHF in my view, but that shouldn’t stop the NHL and NHLPA from creating a space where we get a true top-tier USA-Canada matchup or the venom of Sweden-Finland with both teams at full strength.
Thanks for reading, Happy Thursday. If you haven’t get your mailbag questions in here.