Commissioner's Corner - The CCHL Draft/Coronavirus Conundrum

 Hello everyone,

While the season speeds ahead towards the playoffs, we at the office of the Commissioner are starting to think about the off-season ahead and the turbulence surrounding the CCHL Entry Draft usually held in June.  

Now we know the NHL draft is to be held in July but they are talking about pushing that out to December or even the following year.  Personally, I do not see that happening because there are a ton of other issues that come from moving the draft.  

Would they still be eligible for Unrestricted free agency status at the same time?  Is it the best thing for the Seattle franchise entering the NHL to not have any players to start developing?  NHL teams would also only have one year to decide if they are signing a CHL player rather than the two years they presently have to evaluate if they are worthy of one of 50 precious pro contracts a team can offer.  

The challenge though is that the WHL will only begin play shortly, over a 24 game season.  The OHL still does not have a firm date to return after their latest proposal to do bubbles was rejected by the Ontario government because it lacked detail.  The QMJHL started on time but had a long pause and is now only just starting again.  

European teams and the NCAA have managed to play and I would suspect that this year's draft will heavily favor players from those leagues rather than the CHL.  In conjunction with that, when the CHL leagues can start play regularly next fall, I would suspect that we will see a ton of players taken at 19 in that draft because of their seasons as an 18-year-old.  

The problem with all of this for the CCHL is that we have to try to determine what is best for our draft.  Do we forge ahead in July even if the NHL does not conduct a draft?  At least with last season when we did forge ahead, we had 50 games of reference point to read on and form evaluations rather than potentially zero games played for some draft-eligible players.  

Do we wait until the following June and conduct two drafts?  Would 2021 draft picks still be able to be traded during the next CCHL season or would they become frozen assets?  

Personally, I'm not a fan at all of conducting two drafts at once.  The draft is an absolute grind and if you have never updated the prospect page after the draft you will not have an appreciation of what updating two drafts would be like. Therefore I really do not believe pushing it out until the following summer is an option.  

I don't claim to have the answer today but I am certainly hoping the NHL manages to hold the draft in the summer like they initially planned.  If the OHL can get approval on a 24 game season, I really think that the draft will go ahead as planned because everyone will have played some hockey to be evaluated on.  However, until then it will wait and it is something that we'll have to discuss in the near future.