In forty-years-plus of covering sports you develop hobby horses. Issues that re-appear continuously over time. In our case, one of those issues has been pro hockey’s development model and the NCAA’s draconian rules for its participants. Which was better, and why couldn’t the sides reach a more reasonable model?

In the case of hockey the NCAA’s ban on any player who played a single game in the Canadian Hockey League created a harsh dilemma for hockey prodigies in Canada and the U.S. Throw your lot in with the CHL, hoping to be drafted by the NHL, or play in a secondary league like the USHL till you were eligible for the NCAA.  Prospects in the CHL’s three leagues — the OHL, QMJHL and WHL —were classified as professional by the NCAA because they get $600 a month for living expenses, losing Division I eligibility after 48 hours of training camp. The stipend isn’t considered income for personal tax purposes.”

Over the decades we’ve spoken with many parents and players trying to parse this equation. It was a heartbreaking scene when they gambled on a CHL career that gave them no life skills or education. Or the promised NCAA golden goose never appeared after playing in a lower league for prime development years.

There were tradeoffs. NCAA teams played fewer games, CHL teams played a pro-like schedule. The NCAA awarded scholarships (which could be withdrawn) while the CHL created scholarships for after a career in the league (rules that players getting NHL contracts lost those scholarships has been withdrawn). There were more contrasts.

As we wrote here in 2021, it might have stayed this way but for a tsunami created by the antitrust issue of Name Image Likeness for NCAA players who were not paid for the use of their NIL. When the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on the issue in 2015 it warned the NCAA that its shamateurism scheme had to change. That created revolution in the NCAA. Athletes now receive healthy compensation for their image in video and digital products. They can also take million-dollar compensation from sponsors and boosters.

Portals allow them to skip from team to team to find millions in compensation. One of the many changes in the new NCAA was its prohibition against CHL players. To forestall future lawsuits costing millions, it recently made hockey players eligible for the same revenues as football and basketball players. Now the NCAA has voted to open up college hockey eligibility to CHL players effective Aug. 1, 2025, paving the way for major junior players to participate in the 2025-26 men’s college hockey season.

Which, we wrote in 2022, would leave hockey’s development model vulnerable. “As one insider told us, “The CHL model should be disrupted. Archaic and abusive.” NIL won’t kill the CHL but it could strip away a significant portion of its older stars who choose guaranteed money over long bus rides and billeting with other players. It’s early days, of course, but be prepared for an NHL No. 1 draft pick being a millionaire before his name is even called in the draft.” 

As we wrote in May of 2022 “A Connor McDavid could sign an NIL styled contract at 16 years old, play in the NCAA and— rich already— still be drafted No. 1 overall. Yes, college hockey has a lower profile and fewer opportunities for endorsements. Some will want the CHL’s experience. But a McDavid-type player would be a prize catch for an equipment company or a video game manufacturer. Or even as an influencer. All things currently not allowed in the CHL.” 

Effectively the CHL will get all or most of the top prospects at ages 16-19. After that age prospects drafted or undrafted can migrate to the NCAA model. Whether they can sign NHL contracts upon drafting and still play in the NCAA is unclear at this moment. (“On the positive side, we will get all the top young players coming to the CHL because we’re the best development option at that age,” one WHL general manager told The Athleltic’s Scott Wheeler.

One OHL GM told the Athletic “As the trend increases with American players looking for guarantees to sign, does a CHL player turn down an opportunity to sign at the end of their 19-year-old year with the hopes that a year at 20 in NCAA as a free agent gives them a better route to the NHL?”

The permutations are endless at the moment. But, at least, players and their families have a choice between hockey and education that was forbidden in the past. Plus, they can make money via NIL to allow them to stay for an extra year of development or education. The CHL will take a hit, but most young Canadian players will still see it as the logical launching pad to the NHL.

Now, for once, families can come first on the cold, nasty climb to the top hockey’s greasy pole.

Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster  A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada’s top television sports broadcaster, he’s a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. His new book Deal With It: The Trades That Stunned The NHL And Changed hockey is now available on Amazon. Inexact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft Years In NHL History, his previous book with his son Evan, was voted the seventh-best professional hockey book of all time by bookauthority.org . His 2004 book Money Players was voted sixth best on the same list, and is available via brucedowbigginbooks.ca.

“I think our reverence for the truth might have become a bit of a distraction that is preventing us from finding consensus and getting important things done.” Katherine Maher (NPR CEO)

If Ms. Maher finds the new Donald Trump autocracy uncomfortable, fact-wise, she should apply to replace magenta-haired Catherine Tait as CEO and president of CBC. Ratings? Deficits? A pish-posh distraction. She’d fit right in.

In the wake of the Nov. 5 election, Justin Trudeau’s diehards draw strength from a leader who also eschews reality. He rejects financial accounts in favour of an accounting of the heart. In his attempt at “finding consensus and getting important things done” Canada’s 23rd PM continues to assure Canadians that he will resist the dread Trump agenda by employing not policy but his tantric approach to governance. One where he is the yogi and Canada is the one getting penetrated.

With an unassailable mandate for at least two years Trump has momentum. As seen by the dramatic Trump cabinet appointees, this divine mission will be sorely tested as The Donald loads up his tariff wagon and demands that the freeloader on America’s back pay its share to NATO. And prepare to accept a northward flood of undesirable immigrants.

Trump’s new border czar Thomas Homan has clearly identified Canada’s border weakness. Fear not, says Mr. minus-38 percent approval in polling. Our hearts are pure and our motives unquestioned. Sure. You go with that. (Ontario premier Doug Ford isn’t waiting for Trudeau to smell the Trumpian coffee. He’s warning Mexico about its trade deficiencies, threatening to kick them out of the free trade deal.)

Like America’s ruling class before the 2024 election, Canada’s brahmins are blithely unaware they are being fitted for a rope in 2025. Confident they know best, they issue columns that declare that the public sometimes gets it wrong in elections (ignoring the culpability for Joe Biden). They faint in the face of Elon Musk making X into a dominant  political force. They assume the public is still listening.

The result down south couldn’t possibly be replicated here, because Canada has a ruling class of the first order. And a media paid to repeat that claim. That’s what Americans thought, says Mark Steyn. “The first problem with America’s ruling class: they don’t live where you live; they don’t even want to visit where you live; they have no desire to set foot where you live. And, in consequence, they know nothing.”

The same can be said for Canada’s know-it-alls. They don’t live where you live. They don’t want to live in Brandon or Cornerbrook. They have no desire to set foot in Sturgeon Falls or Fort St. John. The only real places they see are out the car window as they speed away to their cottage in the Laurentians or Muskoka. Ergo, they know nothing worth knowing.

But they know who you are. They clean your homes. They serve you in restaurants. They drive your Ubers. They laugh at your vanities. But the Laurentian elites remain unaware. As a consequence they can say, like Space Cadet No. 1 Melanie Joly, “our border is extremely effective and extremely well guarded” when the U.S. ambassador to Canada warns that the millions of anticipated deportees need to get out of America. Has Joly seen the Portal crossing into Saskatchewan? The St. Stephen-Calais crossing in NB? Fortress Canada couldn’t repel a determined surge of 50 illegals, let alone 500 or 5000, fleeing deportation in the U.S.

And still the balm of Liberal confidence buoys Canada’s upper middle class. They happily ingest the most ludicrous unctions from their government about Trump. Even as their CNN and MSNBC voices are discredited they believe. As we wrote recently, over 50 percent of Americans saw through Kamala Harris and the DEMs coup narratives as complete bushwah. Probably 90 percent of Canadians, however, still lap up these narratives of competent governance.

Their biggest fear remains that the populist revolt against authority in the U.S. might threaten Canada’s faculty lounge cabinet. As we wrote the Chinese spying allegations are typical of the decaying media’s water carrying for the elites. “No one drawing a Liberal support cheque worries aloud that Trudeau knows the truth contained in this files, that it’s injurious to him and the NDP, that Canadians need to know the names of MPs and senators taking bribes, why a police request sat on a minister’s desk for 54 days unopened. 

It’s Poilievre/ Trump who’s untrustworthy. It’s a strategy that the Libs and NDP pray Poilievre will fall for. Pierre’s sin is he doesn’t believe the public should depend on government for everything. That’s heresy in Canada’s Family Compact, and so the Trump comparisons”.

This was how the U.S. Left acted till Nov. 5. Now, the pendulum there is swinging against the administrative state apologists in the U.S. Earlier this month, Boeing’s newly installed CEO, Kelly Ortberg, quietly dismantled the DEI department and accepted the resignation of the office’s vice president. Canada thinks it can still resist this correction with kind hearts and coronets.

A typical example of denial was on Toronto radio this week on which a food shelter advocate and the host discussed the sky-rocketing demand for food hampers in the GTA. They postulated various ideas why this is so. No doubts they were sincere. But in the entire seven-minute segment no one suggested that the Liberals’ mass importation of millions into the city the past five years might have had some impact on these services.

You get the government you deserve. And, as a consequence, you get media you deserve. People like Maher who echo Trudeau’s reverence for China’s ability to get things done outside the democratic sphere. And climate loons who excuse China’s unregulated belching stacks as being under control due to Western examples of carbon pricing and higher taxes.

Perhaps when Trudeau is finally pensioned off by Poilievre we will see some of his still-in-denial women folks, enraged by Little Trump’s victory, adopt the protest tactics of 4B, a South Korean feminist movement in which women swear off dating, mating with, and marrying men. Then we will see if anyone notices that they’ve left the grid. Here’s betting we don’t.

Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster  A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada’s top television sports broadcaster, he’s a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. His new book Deal With It: The Trades That Stunned The NHL And Changed hockey is now available on Amazon. Inexact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft Years In NHL History, his previous book with his son Evan, was voted the seventh-best professional hockey book of all time by bookauthority.org . His 2004 book Money Players was voted sixth best on the same list, and is available via brucedowbigginbooks.ca.