HELSINKI — Over the years it has become a favourite way to track the world under-20s: not rooting for your nation of choice, but rather keeping tabs on your favourite NHL team’s prospects who are participating.
Yeah, there are a few draft-eligible prospects out there, Connor McDavid and Jack Eichel last time around, Auston Matthews this trip. But the vast majority of players have passed through the two most recent NHL Drafts. The tournament provides a useful measure of their progress.
And along the same lines, a healthy contingent of prospects at the world juniors is a bragging point for an organization’s scouting department. If your team of choice has bunch of teenagers out there in prominent roles, then the scouts can pump their chests out.
This has always been the case. Still, there’s significant change that has been playing out: NHL GMs are loaning 18- and 19-year-old players on their big team’s rosters to U-20 programs. Okay, not McDavid if he were healthy or Eichel, but still Vancouver’s Jake Virtanen is on loan to Canada and Boston’s David Pastrnak will be playing for the Czechs.
This follows up the Rangers loaning Anthony Duclair and Ottawa sending Curtis Lazar to the Canadian team for the 2015 tournament.
Then factor in the Leafs sending William Nylander and Kasperi Kapanen from the AHL Marlies to the Swedish and Finnish U-20 teams respectively. The Leafs are following the lead of the Dallas Stars loaning defenceman Julius Honka to Finland from their AHL affiliate.
Take all this in sum and it seems that NHL teams have a greater appreciation of the use of the world juniors for the development of not just of prospects in the pipeline but those who are already in the pro ranks.
Over the years there has been huge resistance to loaning players off NHL rosters. The most painful came back in 1998 when the Bruins didn’t loan Joe Thornton and the Oilers Boyd Devereaux to the Canadian team despite the fact they were playing four or five shifts a game and clearly outmatched with the big clubs.
The prevailing wisdom at the time: winning at the NHL level now was ever the priority and any player who might be able to contribute you kept on hand. Yeah, if he wasn’t playing much or even if he was frequently a healthy scratch, you never know when an injury might strike and you need immediate help.
Now, though, GMs seem to give it real consideration. Of course McDavid and Eichel were always going to be off the table, but Vancouver seemed to take loaning Jared McCann to Canada a serious possibility and likewise St. Louis with Robby Fabbri. Neither team pulled the trigger on it, both deciding that the teens were playing too well and just enough to keep around. Ditto Calgary with Sam Bennett.
Said one NHL scouting director: “It’s not open and shut anymore and I think teams see a benefit to [sending teenagers off the NHL rosters] to the under-20s. If these kids weren’t junior eligible, they’d be candidates for assignment to the AHL. But that option’s just not available to them. They’re either with the big club or back in junior. Now teams see that there’s a potential benefit of sending [to the tournament] a kid who has stalled or hit the wall and needs to get playing a lot and enjoy a little success. Yeah, you’re going without them for a few weeks, but they’re players on the third or fourth line at best, someone who at least for the short run is pretty replaceable with an AHL call-up.
“I think in the past there was some lip service that [GMs] paid to development. Most believed that the best way for a player to develop is with the big club, even if it’s in a limited role or even just practising … especially if the CHL team he’s going to might be less than ideal.”
It’s not quite a paradigm shift. It seems an awfully long shot that we’ll ever see something like an Olympic break where U-20 teams have their picks of the best teenagers in the world—however entertaining that might be. And there’s still lip service about development from NHL GMs.
Still, look back to 2005, when the Canadian team had a slew of 19-year-olds who would have been in the NHL but were available to the U-20 program because of the lockout. Included in that number was Patrice Bergeron, who already had put in a full season with the Bruins. The likes of Bergeron, Ryan Getzlaf, Corey Perry and Shea Weber went on to be key players for a couple of Olympic gold medal winners and have an assortment of trophies, All-Star selections and Cup rings among them. There’s no telling how much playing in the world juniors helped them, if at all. There’s no telling if they’d be as good or better if they had played in the NHL at 19. But no one could mount a case that time with the U-20 team hurt them.
