DimTim wrote: ↑Sat Jul 04, 2020 9:02 pm
Think this is a big issue with current set up in ice hockey.
As a certain Mr Hanson once said about football ‘You can’t win anything with kids’
If you look at the Devils & Steelers rosters last year plenty of over 30’s very few u23’s getting ice time.
EIHL is not a development league if you want to win titles. We’ve also seen there is a big jump from the next tier down up to EIHL e.g. Aaron Nell in the past. Will be interesting how Sam Jones progresses only 22yo. Not much further down the development road than Jordan.
The question for all these apprentices is do they choose NIHL or try to find an EIHL club that will give them ice time.
It's blurred a bit further than that, as generally players from lower tiers ice in top and special team lines. Then they come to the EIHL and in the main fill in bottom 6 roles. Nell was never going to shine at EIHL level as a grinder, plus I thought his skating wasn't up to the EIHL mark the handful of times I'd seen him ice in a Blaze jersey.
As we're also the only nation in the hockey world to have the league as the main competition, the scope to play younger guys more is narrowed even further, since every game is absolute "must win" and coaches lose jobs if teams don't perform enough. So I don't blame the coaches given the conditions they face. On top of that, with over a dozen of imports in their rosters, they can usually make the argument of "why should John Smith from NIHL club X get into even my top 9, where I have guys that have hundreds of NHL/KHL/AHL/DEL/ECHL/SHL games under their belt?"
It's a multi-strand issue that needs all bodies running hockey to work together if we want to change any of that, all of them working in isolation doing their own thing, clearly doesn't work for player development.
