Canada’s system of developing young hockey players is facing a shift that could rock the sport and communities across the country
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Published May 23, 2024 • Last updated 20 hours ago • 19 minute read
NORTH BAY, ONT. — It is a weeknight in early spring, and the Ontario Hockey League’s conference finals have come to this small town on the northern reaches of cottage country. People stream into Memorial Gardens by car and on foot, the latter of which is easy enough to do, since the arena is right across the street from a residential neighbourhood. A DJ in the foyer, “North Bay’s Premier Party Hosts,” blares classic rock to entertain a swelling crowd. A handful of seniors in yellow Lions Club vests sell tickets for a fundraising raffle, the prizes for which are advertised as a barbecue and “meat.”
There are parts of the arena that show its 50-year-old age, such as the snack windows in the lobby, behind which are the old-style popcorn machine, the tubs of cotton candy and the nachos with liquid cheese.
The crowd is starkly different from that which you might see a few hours south at the Scotiabank Arena, home of the Toronto Maple Leafs. There are no suits. There are families with little kids in North Bay Battalion jerseys and hoodies, and groups of seniors wearing the same. By the time the puck drops, the arena’s 4,200 seats are full, and the, “Go, Troops, go,” chants are loud and enthusiastic.
If you were trying to come up with an ideal representation of what junior hockey can mean to a Canadian community, North Bay makes for a pretty good test case. The town of about 50,000 was home to the OHL’s North Bay Centennials for 20 years beginning in 1982. The team eventually ran into financial problems, compounded by a lack of on-ice success. It was sold to new American owners in 2002, who relocated the team to Saginaw, Michigan, where it became the Spirit.
One of the former owners of the Centennials told the CBC in 2012 that the local fan base had become “maybe a little apathetic.”
But the loss of the team was also painful. David Branch, the commissioner of the Ontario Hockey League, recalls being in the Czech Republic for the IIHF World Junior Hockey Championship around the time of the relocation to Saginaw when someone recognized him on the street.
“Hey, Branch,” the woman yelled from the other sidewalk. “How can you do this to North Bay?”
The commissioner says it wasn’t exactly what he was expecting to hear while in a small town outside Prague. “I crossed the street and had a chat with them,” he says. “I felt so bad for them. I could feel it.”
A North Bay Battalion fan cheers on his team during Game 4 of the OHL Eastern Conference Championship Series against the Oshawa Generals at North Bay Memorial Gardens on May 1, 2024. PHOTO BY JOHN LAPPA/POSTMEDIA NEWS
It took a decade for North Bay to get a team back. Renovations to Memorial Gardens, which included the addition of 10 corporate suites tacked on to one side of the building, paved the way for the relocation of the Brampton Battalion from the Toronto suburbs for the beginning of the 2013-2014 season. The team has been successful in its second home, making several deep playoffs runs and regularly playing before a full arena.
“Getting to a Battalion game once or twice a week makes life better in North Bay,” team owner Scott Abbott told local media after it had been in the north for a few seasons. “We can now fully appreciate what we were missing before in terms of fan support and home-ice advantage.”
Branch agrees with that kind of view. “A lot of people in the Toronto market don’t realize just what the game is to these communities, and what our teams do in the communities,” he says. “And it’s just such a positive experience.”
That view, though, is not universal. For more than a decade, since right about when the Battalion moved from Brampton to North Bay, the junior hockey system in Canada has been defending itself on several fronts. There have been lawsuits alleging that players in the Canadian Hockey League, the umbrella organization of the country’s three major junior leagues — the Ontario Hockey League, Western Hockey League, and Quebec-Maritime Junior Hockey League — were unfairly compensated for their work. There have been legal allegations in Canada of antitrust violations, and a lawsuit alleging “systemic abuse.” Revelations about the quick settlement of a sexual-assault lawsuit against Hockey Canada and former members of one of its world-junior teams led to the replacement of most of the national sport organization’s executives and raised questions in the media and on Parliament Hill about the way junior hockey in this country is governed. And, most recently, an antitrust lawsuit filed in U.S. federal court in Manhattan in February accuses the CHL and the National Hockey League of engaging in uncompetitive practices.
“While the major junior leagues are marketed as the surest path to NHL stardom, the reality is that these leagues and their clubs earn hundreds of millions of dollars or more on the backs of their teenage players who receive minimal compensation for their full-time labour,” said a statement from the plaintiffs when the lawsuit was filed in New York. “This case is about unlawful agreements to restrain competition for these players, rendering them nothing more than property of the major junior teams that draft them.”
None of the allegations in the New York lawsuit have been tested in court, and it is very early in the legal process, with a schedule expected to be determined later this month.
Fans celebrate the Saskatoon Blades’ overtime win in Game 5 of the WHL’s Eastern Conference final against the Moose Jaw Warriors at SaskTel Centre on May 3, 2024. PHOTO BY MICHELLE BERG/POSTMEDIA NEWS
While similar charges have been made, unsuccessfully, in recent years in Canadian courts, the U.S. action comes amid significant change in the way amateur and developmental sports are administered in that country. The National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), which for decades zealously protected the idea that college athletes had to be unpaid amateurs, was forced by the courts to allow players to profit from their name-and-image rights that in some cases has already earned certain college stars millions of dollars. Meanwhile, a class-action lawsuit that alleged minor-league baseball players were exploited by a system that didn’t fairly compensate them for their labour was eventually settled by Major League Baseball. Last year, that league agreed to its first collective bargaining agreement with minor-league players, protecting players who throughout baseball history had accepted their poor employment situations as simply the price of holding on to a major-league dream.
All of which leads to a pretty simple question: Is the junior hockey system in Canada about to face a reckoning? And if that means changes that will fundamentally alter the economics of the sport, what does that mean for the communities in which junior hockey is the biggest, or only, game in town?
Orr, Gretzky, Crosby and McDavid
Before considering the changes that might be afoot, it’s worth examining how the major-junior system works. Elite male hockey players are drafted at age 16 into one of the three CHL leagues, and the team that selects them holds their rights for the rest of their junior career, which can run to five years. (In rare cases, players are granted entry into the CHL at an earlier age based on their exceptional ability.) Players are given a monthly stipend of $250 to $450, and if they leave home to join their junior team, they are housed with a local billet family. They can be traded or released, and the players that are drafted by NHL teams once they are 18 years old usually go back to their junior teams for further seasoning and development. CHL players who do not go on to professional hockey careers can get a year of paid education for every year they played junior.
It’s the pathway that most Canadian NHL players followed to get to the pros, with everyone from Bobby Orr and Wayne Gretzky to Sidney Crosby and Connor McDavid having spent time in the CHL. At the Tribute Communities Centre in the Toronto suburb of Oshawa, where the Generals hosted the North Bay Battalion in the OHL playoffs this month, banners celebrating former Oshawa stars such as Orr, Eric Lindros, and Toronto Maple Leafs captain John Tavares hang from the rafters. Underlining the OHL’s importance as a developmental league for the pros was the presence of NHL executives such as Kyle Dubas, former Maple Leafs general manager and current hockey boss of the Pittsburgh Penguins, there to scout potential draftees one night during the series.
It’s a system that has existed for decades, largely untroubled, even if it stands in stark contrast to the way youth sports are handled in some parts of the world. In Europe, soccer players are essentially free agents from birth, and big clubs will often sign talented youngsters to their academy teams while they are still in the early stages of grade school. (Technically, young kids don’t get paid salaries while at soccer academies but, depending on the country, they can sign pro deals at age 16 or 17.) The notion of an amateur draft of such players would be unthinkable but is standard practice in North American professional sports. So, junior hockey’s draft of teenagers is a piece of that system.
Ariel Cleary, 6 holds up packets of Sour Patch kids on the glass as the Knights take to the ice before game 5 of the Western Conference championship against the Saginaw Spirit at Budweiser Gardens in London, Ont. Photograph taken on Friday May 3, 2024. Mike Hensen/The London Free Press/Postmedia Network
It’s a system that is not without its critics. Various unsuccessful attempts have been made to form a junior-hockey players’ union or association like that enjoyed by major-league professionals. In 2014, a class-action lawsuit was filed in a Canadian court that alleged the CHL and its teams were violating minimum-wage laws, claiming that players were effectively full-time employees of their teams, working as many as 60 hours a week, and receiving only those modest stipends. It ended up being something of a marathon legal proceeding. The CHL vigorously defended itself against the lawsuit, and at the same time lobbied every Canadian province to pass legislation that exempted the major-junior leagues from employment standards laws. It successfully argued that its players were not employees of their teams but were amateur athletes who received training, guidance and other benefits. With the provincial laws changed, and the CHL protected from having to treat all future players as employees, the lawsuit was finally settled for $33 million in 2020. The 4,200 former players in the class would receive between $8,000 to $12,000 if they played the average of about two seasons in the CHL, with the number changing based on length of service.
But that settlement was held up by a separate class-action lawsuit, which accused the CHL of violating the federal Competition Act, making arguments similar to those in the recent New York case. That lawsuit was eventually dismissed by a Federal Court judge, and the $33-million settlement of the original 2014 class-action was approved earlier this spring in Ontario and Alberta. (Two former junior players have appealed the settlement in Quebec, which has once again put the entire process on hold until at least June, when it will next return to court.)
In the end, the courts didn’t answer the question of whether CHL players were employees of their teams. “We never ultimately got to a final decision on it,” says Ted Charney, one of the plaintiffs’ lawyers. “Our firm wouldn’t have started this case unless we thought it had some merit.”
CHL versus NCAA
There has been uncertainty about athletes and employment status since the earliest times of organized sport. Tennis and golf used to consider professionalism a little gauche, and even in the early days of the National Hockey League, it wasn’t unusual for players to work second jobs in the off-season, typically for other businesses of their team’s owner. The prevailing attitude was that players who were lucky enough to be professional athletes should be grateful to have such a job.
Saskatoon Blades forward Fraser Minten gives a fan a stick after scoring the winning goal in OT of Game 5 of the WHL’s Eastern Conference final against the Moose Jaw Warriors at SaskTel Centre on May 3, 2024. PHOTO BY MICHELLE BERG/POSTMEDIA NEWS
That changed over the decades as players bargained for improved professional employment conditions, but the NCAA remained the major standard-bearer for amateur athletics, even when some of its sports, primarily football and men’s basketball, rivalled professional leagues in that country in terms of attendance and television ratings. The American college system aggressively policed its amateurism, declaring student-athletes ineligible to compete if they so much as sold an autographed football. The sea change began with a lawsuit filed a decade ago by a former college basketball player who challenged the use of his likeness in an NCAA-licensed video game. A court eventually ruled that the NCAA’s practice of barring payments to athletes violated antitrust laws, and the NCAA lost subsequent appeals. More lawsuits followed and by 2021 the NCAA announced that it would remove restrictions on college athletes related to sponsorships and other paid endorsements. Schools do not make such payments directly, but the biggest programs now have arm’s-length funds, bankrolled by donors and boosters, that use NIL — “name-image-likeness” — marketing deals as a recruiting tool. Athletes in the most popular sports can make thousands of dollars annually, while star recruits can sign NIL deals worth millions. In certain cases, it can now be more lucrative for an athlete to stay in school than turn professional.
And the changes keep coming. In February, the U.S. National Labor Relations Board ruled in favour of the Dartmouth men’s basketball team, which was seeking to unionize.
“Because Dartmouth has the right to control the work performed by the Dartmouth men’s basketball team, and the players perform that work in exchange for compensation, I find that the petitioned-for basketball players are employees within the meaning of the Act,” a director of the NLRB wrote in a decision that allowed the players to vote to form a union, which they did a month later. The Dartmouth players will, as a union, be able to negotiate things such as compensation and training schedules with their school, and if appeals are upheld it could lead to an eventual acknowledgment of all student-athletes as employees.
There is growing acceptance that this is where things are headed. Where U.S. college athletes used to be forced to sit out a year of eligibility if they transferred schools — even if the coach who recruited them left the school — the NCAA in 2021 changed the rules to allow students to transfer once without penalty. Legal challenges have since argued that the cap on free transfers is unfair, and while the process is ongoing, the courts have largely agreed. Elite college players could soon be able to move from school to school and team to team as unrestricted free agents before turning pro, a complete reversal of the athlete-school power structure that existed for decades, where players were beholden to the schools in which they enrolled, even if their athletic careers were sputtering.
The changes are also likely to have an impact on the Canadian Hockey League. The NCAA’s insistence on amateurism has long meant that CHL players were ineligible to play U.S. college sports because they had received money in the form of the monthly stipends. Players have always had to choose one or the other: Canadian junior system or NCAA. But with the NCAA now allowing its athletes to receive NIL deals, the restriction against CHL players is plainly outdated. Hockey observers expect that CHL players will be granted NCAA eligibility within a season or two.
Wayne Kosior of TrailBlazer Hockey Advisors, which provides services to players and their families who are trying to choose where to play hockey in their mid- to late teenage years, says college coaches in the U.S. uniformly expect the rules to change. He thinks the courts have played a role in forcing that change, and points to the example of Kirby Smart, the University of Georgia football coach who in early May agreed to a 10-year, $130-million contract.
“So, here’s a kid who’s making 250 bucks a month playing for the Prince Albert Raiders in the Western Hockey League, and he’s a professional and can’t play in the NCAA, yet the coach can make $130 million coaching football,” Kosior says. “It’s a very, very disparate rationale.
If freedom of movement between the CHL and the NCAA does come, Kosior doesn’t think it will lead to any kind of mass exodus from the Canadian junior system. Where it could impact the CHL is with the potential for elite players to spend a couple of years in junior, say their age 16 and 17 years, before leaving for an NCAA scholarship and possibly a pro career after that.
North Bay Battalion fans — including, at bottom left, Adam Weichel, Tami Miller and their daughter, Kenzie — during Game 4 of the OHL Eastern Conference Championship Series against the Oshawa Generals at North Bay Memorial Gardens on May 1, 2024. PHOTO BY JOHN LAPPA/POSTMEDIA NEWS
Kosior also notes that the CHL could change its own rules to require a more firm commitment from its players, perhaps by tying its academic scholarship program to a certain minimum length of service. It’s also possible that there could be a bidding war of sorts as the CHL and NCAA compete for recruits. “(The CHL) may say, ‘Hey, we’ve got to make it more financially lucrative for these kids to stay in the CHL,’” Kosior says. “I think it’s going to be a competitive response by the CHL.”
Asked if the next Connor McDavid, the one who is maybe only 10 years old today, is likely to be paid something more like a full-time employee in the future, Kosior says, “He’s going to be making more money than today, right? I don’t think it’s going to be drastic, but I also don’t think it’s going to be an inflationary increase. It might be three-, four- or five-fold.”
That would, he notes, put some of the CHL’s less profitable teams under considerable financial strain. The financial health of CHL franchises has long been a point of contention, as most of the 60 teams in nine provinces and four states are privately held. Evidence filed in the 2014 class-action suggested that a handful of teams made robust profits, but most ran closer to break-even or at a modest loss.
“And so, will some teams survive? Some won’t,” Kosior says. “But I’m a big believer that there’s always continual change.”
‘These players are our property’
The class-action lawsuit filed in the U.S. district court for the Southern District of New York in February seeks to bring about change of a more seismic sort. In addition to seeking monetary damages related to the amount of money that former junior players would have made in an open market, the lawsuit seeks an injunction that would effectively bar the CHL from operating the way it does. The injunction would stop the practice of assigning potential players to one of the three major-junior leagues based on the province or state in which they live, it would prevent the use of the leagues’ standard player contracts and compensation, and it would stop the use of what the lawsuit calls an “involuntary” player draft.
“The primary goal of our effort here is to change the system through injunctive and equitable relief, that will prohibit the defendants from continuing to operate as they’ve operated, by court order,” says Ethan Litwin, partner at Constantine Cannon in New York and co-counsel for the plaintiffs, represented by a pair of former CHL players, one Canadian and one American, as well as the World Association of Ice Hockey Players Union.
Such a decision would, plainly, be the end of the junior-hockey system as we know it. Which would not be an accident. Junior players are, the lawsuit alleges, “paid a mere fraction of what they would earn in a competitive marketplace and are thus substantially under-compensated despite the full-time, physically demanding nature of the labour they provide.”
Junior players, the lawsuit alleges, “have been historically fearful of challenging these illegal agreements because of the risk that doing so would jeopardize their careers and perhaps eliminate their chances of ever competing in the NHL.”
Moose Jaw Warriors fans cheer during Game 7 of the WHL’s Eastern Conference final against the Saskatoon Blades at SaskTel Centre on May 7, 2024.
“The NHL and the three major junior leagues have said, ‘These players are our property and we’re going to agree on rules about how we can use that property to maximize our own interest, without any consideration that these are kids or that these kids are providing us with their labour,’” Litwin says. “They’re making agreements among themselves as the most powerful entities in North American hockey, and they are going to control how everything works. You can’t do that under antitrust laws.”
If the lawsuit were to succeed, and a court ordered the CHL to cease doing what it does, hockey development would be facing a clean-slate moment. “It’s really then up to the marketplace and the parties involved to figure out how they’re going to move forward,” Litwin says. “And we take no position on what that would be.”
Would a system in which clubs had to compete to recruit and sign junior players mean that far fewer of them would be able to operate? Would a collective bargaining agreement between the leagues and junior players sufficiently address the arguments made in the antitrust complaint? This was the case with minor-league baseball, where a CBA allowed the system to remain intact, but with better employment provisions for the players, many of whom never make it to a big major-league payday. Would the NHL have to step in and ensure that it has a developmental league that is more under its own control, rather than benefit from the existence of the CHL as it does now? The National Basketball Association has its developmental G-League for players not able to make NBA rosters, and the big league even created a specific developmental team for young players who wanted to bypass the NCAA and turn pro; that team is being wound down because of the money-making opportunities now available in college.
All such options would be on the table.
A Canadian class-action lawsuit filed in 2020 alleged that the CHL had violated the federal Competition Act by imposing “unreasonable terms and conditions upon (major-junior players), such as the imposition of ‘nominal wages’ and ‘the loss of rights to market their image, sponsorship, and endorsement opportunities.’” That lawsuit was dismissed in 2021, with the judge ruling that the junior-hockey system did not meet the standard of a Competition Act violation.
But U.S. antitrust law is known to sometimes take a broader view of what constitutes a breach, as evidenced by the case that undid decades of enforced amateurism — and free athletic labour — amid the money-making enterprises of the NCAA. It is, again, early days for the New York class-action, and the NHL and CHL will almost certainly attempt to have it dismissed.
NHL careers
David Branch has been the commissioner of the Ontario Hockey League since 1979 and was the commissioner of the CHL for 25 years, ending in 2019. These playoffs, ending with the Memorial Cup that runs from May 24 to June 2, will be his last, Branch having announced his retirement plans earlier this season. He says it is far too soon to know if the NCAA will change its rules, and if those potential changes would have a noticeable impact on the CHL and the communities they play in. As for criticism of the junior-hockey system, he insists the good outweighs the downside.
North Bay Battalion fans on May 1, 2024, including, top left, Dave Luxton; at top right, John Marcil, right, and his brother, Andre; and Bill Casey, bottom right. PHOTO BY JOHN LAPPA/POSTMEDIA NEWS
“The OHL remains the No. 1 developmental league in the world for the NHL,” he says. “Typically, about 50 per cent of our players sign contracts professionally,” he adds, meaning either with the NHL, in the North American minor leagues or in Europe. “So, half of our players do, in fact, have an opportunity to go on and explore their hockey interests.” Most of the other half, Branch says, use the scholarship package to attend Canadian schools. “I think there’s about two per cent of the players that we haven’t necessarily been able to track. But, I mean, that’s an incredible story.”
As for arguments that the stipends and scholarships aren’t enough compensation for players who can play before sold-out arenas where fans are buying $12 beers, Branch says there are other benefits conferred on players.
“We, on average, spend somewhere between $38,000 to $42,000 on players in terms of equipment and programming, and we pay for their education and billeting and food and travel while they play in our league,” he says.
It brings up the flip-side to the treat-them-as-employees argument: then who pays for the kid’s housing and food?
For someone like Kosior, who has clients who pursue both CHL and non-CHL hockey careers, he sees the cases for and against the existing structure.
“The argument I’ve always heard, and there’s some validity to it, is that the job of a CHL team is to develop that player and get them to a professional NHL contract, where hopefully that player can make in excess of a million dollars a year,” he says. “Well, it’s pretty low odds.” (Eighty players from the CHL’s 60 teams were selected at the 2023 NHL Draft last spring.) “And, again, they’ll argue that there’s an academic scholarship that comes with it, which is valid.”
But some of the bigger NCAA schools have athletic scholarships that are worth six figures, annually, leaving aside any money that might be earned under NIL rules. “So, those players are certainly being compensated more than the average citizen,” Kosior says. “There’s arguments on both sides. The truth is usually somewhere in the middle.”
Up in North Bay, where the Battalion seemed about to go down quickly to the top-seeded Generals in the OHL playoffs, they rallied for three straight wins, including a rousing 6-1 victory at a sold-out Memorial Gardens, to force a deciding Game 7 against Oshawa. A bit of good news for the biggest team in town. It didn’t last. The Generals blew out the Battalion, 6-1, in Game 7. There’s always next year. The question is what next year will look like.
Back to Branch, who has a story to finish: “I was up in North Bay six weeks ago, at a celebration of life for an individual who had been a longtime official in our league,” Branch says. “And I’m walking along and this woman comes up and grabs me and says, ‘Remember me?’ And I said, ‘Help me out.’ “She said, I’m the one who yelled at you.’”
In the Czech Republic, that is, more than 20 years ago. “I just said,” Branch continues, “How do you like it now?”
Much better, one imagines.
