CCHL Views From the Commissioner's Office - Summer edition

With the draft now in the rearview mirror, it's time to pontificate about the future of the league and where we go from here. 

I'm happy to say that everyone, by-and-large, seems happy about our first every all online draft.  I was very happy about how it all went and appreciate everyone supporting another of my crazy ideas to improve the CCHL. 

We did a survey a few weeks ago to ask about the prospect reserve list and limit the number of prospects.  After careful consideration and a suggestion from the Swedish contingent of the league, we're going to do it a bit differently. 

We are going to ask, in the near future, for a list of anyone on your prospect reserve list that you want to keep but with a caveat.  That caveat is that the player will need to have been drafted within the last seven years in order to move to the main prospect list.  Once we have the list, we will eliminate the prospect reserve list. 

As for the limit on prospects, we have decided that a limit isn't the most effective way to do it as each year we would need a drop list.  Instead, we are going to add a column to the prospect sheet with a year in it seven years from their CCHL draft date. 

Essentially this means that the player has seven (7) years from the time of their CCHL draft to make it to the main roster.  If within seven years the player does not make it, they are deleted from the prospect sheet. 

Why seven years you ask?  In doing some studies of drafts from 2005-2015, there are literally only a handful of players that made the disk after seven years; with some of them having gone to Europe for awhile before coming back.  They were also, shockingly, not impact players at all for their respective teams. 

Goalies are a bit of a different breed that can take longer than seven years, but studies also show that most of the time they have at least appeared as a backup regularly by the time they are 25.  We also draft a lot of goalies after their initial draft year which can extend that window to 26-28 in a lot of cases.  It's not an exact science but most impactful goaltenders are on the disk by the time they are seven years post-draft. 

WORLD JUNIOR STYLE TOURNEY COMING TO THE CCHL? 

One of the things I've discovered this off-season is a process to take our prospects and convert them to Simon T ratings.  I've done quite a few of these to see how it looked and the ratings are really good as it compares all of the leagues to one another to generate ratings. 

It got the wheels turning a little bit as most of us love the World Junior tournament.  What if we did something in the CCHL for this?  After getting feedback from a few people I flushed out the idea a bit more and decided with the executive committee that we can put some financial fun into it for the league bank accounts. 

The plan is to run this tournament from Dec 21-31, over the Christmas break.  While we have always run games during this time, we're going to take a ten day break from the regular season schedule and just run the prospects tournament to allow everyone to take a break over a time of year that is generally busy for most. 

We'll have a whole lot more information on the World Junior style tournament in the coming weeks/months but this is sure to be exciting change this Christmas season. 

That's all for now.  I hope everyone is staying safe, Covid-free and is just about set to enjoy the resumption of sports in North America. 

-Matt