Fully agree....no junior hockey league that deals with minor age players should be conducting drafts forcing players to play in a locality far from home and a support network.
Of course, this would also have implications for other junior leagues such as the USHL and NAHL that also conduct drafts.
Drafts (or “priority selections” as the CHL calls them) are not inherently odious. They can be collectively bargained, though one would need to really push the limits of imagination to conjure circumstances that would lead any union to willingly expose minor children to such a process.
Historically, the CHL drafts were created when the junior sponsorship era ended.
During the sponsorship era, NHL teams scouted youth teams and then tried to sign players to a C-card. If the player signed (say, like 14 year-old Bobby Orr did with the Boston Bruins in 1962), his deal was with the NHL team, not a junior club, and the NHL club could assign the player to one of its sponsored junior teams. In Orr’s case, that was Oshawa.
But Orr didn’t
have to sign with Boston. He had the unfettered right to sign a C-card with ANY NHL team. Further, Orr didn’t
have to play for Oshawa. His parents negotiated hard with the Bruins — they ultimately rejected having their son report to Niagara Falls (another of the Bruins sponsored junior teams) and selected Oshawa with strict conditions, such as Bobby got to continue living in Parry Sound but commute for games, which in his first season would be played in Toronto instead of Oshawa. They even negotiated the Bruins agreement to financially subsidize the Parry Sound Minor Hockey Association for a few years, so more families could afford to have their kids play.
Conversely, the Bruins did not
have to agree to those terms, nor did they
have to agree to a) buy Bobby’s dad a car and b) pay to have the Orrs’ home stuccoed. But they
did agree, and in exchange they “owned” the exclusive playing rights to a player who would change the game and eventually bring two Stanley Cups to Beantown (and win two Smythes for good measure).
When the junior sponsorship system ended, the junior leagues “copied” the newly-expanded NHL entry draft and created their own drafts. In the WHL, the early drafts were of Peewees, before someone finally realized that drafting kids before they’d finished grade 7 was a bit rich, so they shifted to a bantam draft of 9th graders. Quebec and Ontario cull the grade 10s.
Also, along with these drafts, the junior hockey “Standard Player Agreement” was created, which was etched in stone for everyone. No more cars for dad. No more stuccoed houses for the family. No more ensuring kids didn’t have to move hundreds of miles away with no choice. More importantly, no more options. Live in Victoria, B.C., and get drafted by the WHL club in Brandon, Manitoba? Shut up and be happy — getting conscripted is an honour. The three CHL leagues have draft territories that run North-South to carve up North America, which means a kid in Massachusetts interested in playing CHL junior hockey is bound to the Quebec-Maritimes League team that lays claim to him.
In my view, this was not ever a legitimate player development model. No, it was and remains (in my largely minority view) a hideous business model intended to turn minor children into chattel, ostensibly in the name of “competitive balance” but in truth to make player costs as uniformly low as possible.
It’s indefensible and needs to go.
