Kukla's Korner Hockey
Entries with the tag: hockey canada
Bump the Draft Age to 19
by Alanah McGinley on 10/21/11 at 02:35 PM ET
Comments (0)
From John MacKinnon of Postmedia via Calgary Herald:
For all the right reasons, Hockey Canada president Bob Nicholson has suggested the NHL make its annual entry draft a harvest of 19-year-old talents, not 18-year-olds.
There’s little doubt that sort of change would rationalize the entire hockey system, permitting midget teams to hold onto their best players for another year, allowing young talents one more year to polish their games in major junior, letting all sorts of European players remain home for another season in their formative years.
Nicholson is serious about plumping for this change, so much so he prepared a nine-page position paper on it and sent it to NHL headquarters.
“For the most part, 18-and 19-year-old players are not close to being ready for the NHL. If the draft goes back a year, it slows down the process at every level,” Nicholson told Eric Francis of Sun Media. “Right now, everyone is on a treadmill to get there.”
Filed in: NHL Talk, | KK Hockey | Permalink
Tags: bob+nicholson,
entry+draft,
hockey+canada
Chynoweth Made Hockey Better
by Alanah McGinley on 11/03/08 at 01:38 PM ET
Comments (0)
From John McGourty at NHL.com,
Many former Canadian junior players, past and present, have gone on to NHL careers, but many more have gotten college educations as a result of the scholarship programs that Chynoweth instituted.
“Ed was the prime mover in the concept that not everybody gets to ‘The Show,’” said his longtime friend, Jim Donlevy, the WHL’s director of education services. “These kids worked their buns off during their careers in the WHL and we have to protect them, Ed said. It was part of his philosophy to develop the whole person, not just inside the boards. This is his legacy, a huge legacy for this man. It’s wonderful what he did.
“He never apologized for a kid wanting to play in the WHL to get to the NHL. That’s their objective. Ed was able to convince others that there was no question that something had to be done on the post-career education-end of things. The seeds of that course were planted by Ed.”
Filed in: Hockey Related Stories, | KK Hockey | Permalink
Tags: ed+chynoweth,
hockey+canada
