I understand why the Quebec league pushed the start of next season back a couple of weeks.
It gets them in line with the Canadian Hockey League’s other partners — the Ontario Hockey League and Western Hockey League. It also means teams can ice more legitimate rosters during the early part of the season.
Opening on Sept. 8 this year meant several league stars were still away at NHL training camps. The Saint John Sea Dogs, for example, were missing a dozen players for a few games. Naturally, they lost those outings to teams that normally wouldn’t have any business making it close against them. Fans who paid to attend those games may not have felt like they got fair value for their dollar.
So for a lot of reasons, the decision to move opening night to Sept. 20 makes sense. But there are plenty of other reasons why it makes no sense at all.
For starters, the pre-season is already too long. Players reported to training camp in mid-August last year, like they do every year. That gives teams just over three weeks to make their roster decisions and get everyone on the same page. That’s more than enough time to ramp up for the season, perhaps even too much time for junior teams whose rosters are typically 80 or 90 per cent set before the first skate of training camp is held.
So now they’re going to add nearly two more weeks to the pre-season to make it a five-week slog? That’s absurd.
I don’t envy coaches who will now need to find even more ways to keep the players engaged during the tedious lead-up to the season. And if the league decides to pass that time with more exhibition games, I pity the general managers who have to watch their top talent risk injury a few more times.
Does anyone recall what happened to Marty Frk in the Halifax Mooseheads’ second-to-last game of the pre-season this year? Frk suffered a concussion and missed the first 3 1/2 months of the regular season. Mooseheads teammate Andrew Ryan also broke his ankle during a training camp practice.
I’m sure the Mooseheads brass were thrilled to lose two top players during a pointless part of the year.
The obvious compromise would be to start training camp later to make up for the Sept. 20 regular-season opening, but that’s where everyone’s hands are tied. The Quebec college system requires students to be enrolled and available for classes by Aug. 20 each year. Since the majority of the league’s players are from that province, roster decisions must be made for those kids by that deadline.
It wouldn’t be fair to those players or the teams to start training camp on, say, Sept. 1, when those kids are already supposed to be attending classes. So we’re stuck with the Aug. 15 training camp start.
What’s worse, by starting the regular season on Sept. 20, the league is compromising the education of every player in the league.
When the league pushed its season opener into the Sept. 8 range, a bit of breathing room was created in the schedule. The league was able to schedule fewer weekday games so players didn’t have to miss as many classes or sacrifice as much of their study time. Now they have to cram those games into a shorter time frame. For a league that prides itself on its education standards, this is a step backwards.
An acceptable solution to the education issue would have been to start the season later but cut a few games out of the schedule to make it more manageable for the players. But let’s not be naive. There is no way the league’s owners would sacrifice that much revenue just to lighten the players’ load at school.
So for better or worse, we have an imperfect schedule with an imperfect set of variables dictating that it won’t be optimized any time soon. C’est la vie in the Quebec league, I suppose.
Willy Palov covers the Halifax Mooseheads and the QMJHL for The Chronicle Herald. Follow him on Twitter @willypalov.
