The Ontario Hockey League is facing a reckoning that will require more than the standard shoulder shrug. For too many years, the league has simply shrugged off a team losing a player from its roster to an early departure from junior hockey. Those losses had mostly been caused by an NHL team opting to keep a player before his junior eligibility had expired. The rationale from the NHL's perspective is that OHL and Canadian Hockey League clubs are financially compensated with a development fee by NHL clubs for a player drafted.
New Challenges from the NCAA
But now, with NCAA teams also gobbling up Canadian Hockey League talent before their eligibility time has expired, it is long past time that junior hockey takes a more proactive approach. No doubt league officials are exploring several options. Trying to compete financially with the NCAA would create problems for smaller market teams, but with the OHL Draft less than two weeks away, there is one simple solution that can be put in place now to give some help to teams to overcome those losses.
Compensatory Draft Capital
It is time the OHL provided some form of compensation to clubs losing talent early to the NCAA – or even the NHL for that matter – and the easiest way to do that is to provide some sort of draft capital to those teams losing talent to try and lessen the blow. “I would love to be compensated,” Spitfires’ general manager Bill Bowler said.
The National Football League has done it for years by providing compensatory picks to teams that lose players to free agency to help fill the void left by that lost player. Major League Baseball also has a compensatory draft pick system in place for departing free agents that reject a qualifying offer from their team to stay.
Impact on Teams
In junior hockey, most clubs build for a run to a title and rebuild after that run, and the thinking is usually based on a four-year calendar. The Guelph Storm will host next year's Memorial Cup, but this week became the latest victim of a team having its plans upended with an unexpected early roster departure as former first-round pick Quinn Beauchesne, who is a Pittsburgh Penguins draft pick, announced he will not return to junior and instead head to the NCAA to play for Boston College. At this point, it leaves the Storm with no option but to simply move on and try to fill another void in the lineup with whatever resources are still on hand.
“I believe, with the new landscape in hockey, there has to be new ways to compensate teams that lose high-end players to an institution where there is no compensation for picks,” Bowler said. So, what if the OHL compensated the Storm, who made Beauchesne a first-round pick in 2023, with at least a compensatory second-round draft pick to offset the club for the one year it will lose of that player's services? That will at least give Guelph some capital to seek out a trade partner to use that pick to help offset the loss and bolster the lineup ahead of the Memorial Cup.
