TORONTO — On Wednesday and Thursday, owners for nearly all of the CHL’s 60 clubs — or a senior representative on their behalf — gathered at Toronto’s Sheraton Gateway Hotel for what the league is calling its “Meeting of the Members.”
The two-day event, organized by CHL president Dan MacKenzie and his leagues’ three new commissioners — OHL commissioner Bryan Crawford, who began in August, WHL commissioner Dan Near, who began in February, and QMJHL commissioner Mario Cecchini, whose 18 months on the job make him the longest-tenured of the trio — marks the first time all three leagues and their teams have gathered together en masse in more than two decades.
It also comes at a critical juncture for Canadian major junior hockey as the NCAA mulls over opening up eligibility for CHL players to play in college hockey.
The Athletic went to the meetings to sit down with MacKenzie, all three commissioners and multiple owners to discuss a range of topics ranging from the health of the leagues, the new leadership, the upcoming CHL USA Prospects Challenge, W5’s report this week on a new allegation of sexual assault within the OHL, the NCAA’s looming decision, the 2025 Memorial Cup in Rimouski, and even expansion and potential changes to the leagues’ drafts.
The NCAA elephant in the room
Earlier this month, the NCAA’s Division I Council began discussions at its October meeting about aligning college hockey’s rules governing pre-enrolment activity with those in other college sports. A final decision on the proposal, which could include removing language which has designated Canadian major junior hockey league players as professionals and ineligible to play NCAA hockey, could be made as early as the council’s next meeting in November and implemented for August 1, 2025, opening the NCAA to CHL players for the 2025-26 season.
It, and its implications, were top of mind in the CHL’s meetings this week.
There seems to be optimism and even excitement about what it could mean for the leagues.
“We see ourselves as the best development option for kids between 16-20 and anytime we don’t get a high-end kid we’re disappointed. And we’d argue that in a lot of cases they’ve been making the decision to go elsewhere to preserve NCAA eligibility, and in theory that wouldn’t happen and all of the best players would play in the best league, which I think checks out for us,” Near said. “We’re not arrogant. We don’t necessarily think that every player will play in the WHL through their 20-year-old year but we believe that the strong majority will. And we’re not just going to sit here and rest on our laurels, we’re going to react.”
All three commissioners said they’re happy players and their families won’t have to make a decision about their future at 15 years old if the NCAA opens up eligibility.
“It’s a tremendous opportunity for young players and their families,” Crawford said. “We think it’s going to be incredibly positive for our league and for the growth of hockey and the development pathway for hockey players.”
Sarnia Sting owner and president of hockey operations David Legwand knows that decision firsthand as an American-born former NHL player who chose to play for the Plymouth Whalers in the OHL.
“I think guys think about it maybe too much. There’s a route for everybody and picking that route is hard. It’s a lifelong decision and to do it at such a young age is difficult. And you don’t ever want to see anybody make the wrong decision. If the rules do change, it’ll help kids out and maybe extend that life decision a couple of years and give kids the best opportunity to see where they end up,” Legwand said.
“Obviously the landscape’s going to change and we’ve got to keep up with the times and evolve, but it’s exciting for everybody — the kids, the players, the NCAA, our league, wherever kids are going it’s good. We want kids playing hockey. It gets back to the grassroots. It’s going to be the kids’ decision. Every league wants the best kids but that’s going to come about through recruitment and seeing your facilities and getting them involved to want to be a part of your team.”
MacKenzie said the CHL’s pitch won’t change, but they’re not going to necessarily sit still either.
“Our league is the best league in the world. We’re pretty confident that we’re going to be a destination. (But) we understand that we’re going to have to be open to change,” MacKenzie said.
Cecchini said he welcomes it for the QMJHL.
“We’ve had many calls since the rumors started with players, and parents, and agents, of ‘Can we come back?’ which goes to the reason that the only reason they went around our league was because they had decided to go to a U.S. college,” the QMJHL commissioner said. “And now we can attract Americans. We are very optimistic to attract the best of the best in our league and I think we will benefit from it, but the devil is in the details so we’ll see how they write it.”
Those details include whether a player who is signed to an NHL contract will remain ineligible (which Cecchini expects will be the case, though he also acknowledged “it’s not our rules, so it’s up to them”) and whether the NHL’s collective bargaining agreement, which is up in Sept. 2026, will align the signing rights for CHL players to line up with those of the NCAA: as it stands, NHL clubs retain the rights to drafted CHL players for two years but NCAA players for four.
“My first phone call to Bill Daly was actually understanding from him how CHL guys have two years to sign and NCAA guys have four years and even five years in Europe in some cases,” Cecchini said. “These are all things that are on the table right now and that paradigm shift is going to make us move a little bit quicker and forward towards the future.”
Notably, the NHL-CHL agreement, which governs the relationship between the two levels, is in place for “several years” beyond the expiry of the NHL’s CBA. Crawford said he hasn’t yet been in touch with the NHL about some of the particulars but that those conversations will come. For now, the OHL wants to let things play out organically over time to assess some of the impacts.
MacKenzie did have a call with officials from USports last week to discuss what some CHL players going the NCAA route after their junior careers could mean for Canadian university hockey, though.
“USports offers academically fantastic educational opportunities and the NCAA is not for everybody,” MacKenzie said. “USports should still provide a great opportunity for a lot of kids to play university hockey.”
Cecchini also clarified that right now, the scholarship money promised to players can be used for tuition “wherever (players) want in the world” and that “NCAA schools will become part of what (they) can look at.”
He has raised concerns specific to Quebec about French-language schooling options for their players, though, and has expressed that he’d like for the scholarship money to stay in the QMJHL’s territories — which, he pointed out, also includes top programs like the University of New Brunswick and others across eastern Canada.
“We only have one French university in the province of Quebec, so we have to develop university hockey in Quebec as well,” Cecchini said. “We’ve got two big English (universities), McGill and Concordia, who have to play with Ontario. It’s not chauvinistic, it just makes good sense that you want to keep the brains that will build the future of our country here. (A French kid’s) looking at a sea of English options.”
Expansion?
Last week, as talk swirled around the NCAA’s decision, I got the following text from a head coach in the USHL: “My hope is we can create one super junior league. I think this is a great opportunity to make hockey unbelievable in junior. Imagine having 32-36 teams across North America that is a mini NHL.”
I don’t think the half of the CHL’s members who wouldn’t be included in a league of that size would feel very good about that idea, but I did ask MacKenzie and Crawford expansion — specifically if, in whatever comes next, they’d be open to potentially adding more markets in the U.S.
They didn’t rule it out.
Crawford has a lot on his plate in the early days of his tenure, with visits to all 20 OHL markets to complete (he got 25 percent of the way there with a trip to Barrie on Thursday night after the meetings), new arenas in the works in markets like Sudbury and Ottawa, and still-new teams in Brantford and Brampton.
But when asked if he’d thought at all about expansion yet, he answered simply, “Yeah.”
“I think we absolutely need to be open to all sorts of opportunities to expand our business, whether that be broadcasting and media partnerships or potentially expansion as well and looking at opportunities to grow our league,” said Crawford. “Those are things that we have to be consistently and constantly exploring and considering.”
Though expansion happens at the league level with approval from their own board of governors, the CHL does also have approval and MacKenzie said he believes they should all keep an open mind about whatever comes after the NCAA’s decision.
“We will have larger discussions and who knows what opportunities are going to present themselves through the initial dust settling if the rules do change,” MacKenzie said. “It might create some opportunities that we haven’t thought of, but right now we’re not focused on them. Each of the leagues are looking at their league and the implications of expanding, the player pool, the right markets and the right buildings. This kind of a change could create opportunities, but it’s too early to say what those are going to be.”
Draft age changes?
A coach in the Big Ten conference also told me last week that he’d heard “rumours” the CHL might want to move its draft age to 15 in order to pivot towards having “the best 15-to-18-year-olds.”
The WHL’s bantam age (15U) draft is already set a year ahead of the OHL’s (where players are selected after their minor midget, or 16U, season) and the QMJHL’s (midget AAA, or 18U, is the more predominant level in Quebec minor hockey but its draft age, like the OHL’s, is 16).
Crawford said lowering the OHL’s draft age is “certainly a possibility.”
“I don’t think that any of us are closed off to any of the possibilities and that includes the draft potentially being earlier,” Crawford said. “That’s also part of what we’ve been looking at as a group in the CHL is ‘do those sorts of things need to be aligned and harmonized so that we all have the same draft rules and those sorts of things?’ I think there’s an incredible number of considerations that need to be looked at that have far-reaching ramifications of a change like this (from the NCAA).”
Inaugural CHL USA Prospects Challenge
We’re a little more than a month out from the CHL USA Prospects Challenge, a new two-game series between the top draft-eligible players in the CHL and the U18 team at USA Hockey’s NTDP.
London and Oshawa will host this year’s games and it sounds like two WHL markets will get next year’s, followed by the QMJHL the following year. There is a fourth-year option for games in the United States, either in Plymouth, Mich., at the NTDP or potentially in an American CHL market.
The new partnership came out of a mutual desire to fill a void of best-on-best hockey between Canada and the United States at the U18 level. Right now, Canada sends its best to the Hlinka Gretzky Cup while the NTDP is between cycles, and the United States sends its best to U18 worlds while the CHL playoffs are ongoing. But the CHL also heard from the NHL that it would like to see the two sides’ prospects play in games.
While the CHL team could feature some American and European draft eligibles and some in the USHL have expressed frustrations that the U.S. side of the equation will be just the NTDP team, the hope is the two games will tug on the Canada-U.S. rivalry and offer a more competitive setting than the now-defunct CHL/NHL Top Prospects Game did.
Expect the CHL to announce its roster early next week.
Memorial Cup preparations in full swing
Alexandre Tanguay was the youngest owner in the CHL and one of the youngest in all of sports when his legendary grandfather, Maurice, passed down his majority stake in the Rimouski Oceanic to him at just 22 years old — while he was still finishing his finance major at the University of Quebec in 2015.
Almost a decade later, the now-31-year-old is still the youngest owner in the league and has successfully won the hosting rights for May’s Memorial Cup.
As part of Rimouski’s pitch, Tanguay put together a business plan which promised an affordable Memorial Cup for “every little family in Eastern Quebec.” Now, a little over two weeks after making full-tournament ticket packages available at a price point around $500 (the cheapest in 15 years), they’ve sold out. They don’t expect an empty seat in the house for any game, including those Rimouski aren’t playing in, as they celebrate 30 years of history.
There could be some big names in town, too. Vincent Lecavalier and Brad Richards (who is a part of the organizing committee), for sure.
And maybe, just maybe, Sidney Crosby — who brought the Stanley Cup to Rimouski — and Alexis Lafrenière.
“I mentioned to a couple of my partners over the last couple of days in Toronto that I couldn’t have the conversation with Sidney yet because that would mean that he wouldn’t be in the Stanley Cup playoffs,” Tanguay said, laughing. “Everybody who knows Sidney knows you can’t go there with him but I’m sure that he’s going to be able to be with us.”
A new accusation of sexual assault
Though MacKenzie has been at the helm of the CHL for five years now, his new slate of commissioners, two of whom are in their first full season, spoke a lot this week about a clean slate and a desire to do some things differently.
“It’s a chaotic time and the landscape is really hectic as people are trying to figure out, ‘Hey, what does the development path of junior hockey players look like?’” Near said. “And it’s such a massive undertaking around ‘How do we take this thing to the next level?’ And I couldn’t be more excited to be doing it with two new commissioners and this notion that we’re all starting from scratch and we don’t have any preconceived notions. There’s not a lot of baggage, there’s not a lot of tension or history or things that get us too worked up.”
Beyond the NCAA’s ruling, it’s been a busy, tumultuous few years for the CHL and its leagues.
Cecchini is the QMJHL’s commissioner because commissioner 0f 37 years Gilles Courteau resigned in March of 2023 amid a hazing scandal that rose to Quebec’s legislature. That season, attendance dropped and the QMJHL hit a low in players selected in the NHL draft.
This summer, two former QMJHL players were handed jail sentences for sexually assaulting a minor at a hotel in June 2021 after the Victoriaville Tigres championship.
“I’ve tried to rebuild the reputation that was hurt back in March of 2023,” Cecchini said.
He has also reduced the QMJHL schedule from 68 to 64 games, changed the league’s name and overseen a ban on fighting.
Their draftees were up in 2024 over 2023. The league’s finances are starting to bounce back post-pandemic as well, and they haven’t seen a reduction in sponsorship money in line with the reduction in games, according to Cecchini. Attendance was back up last year and is up year-over-year more than 10 percent into this season so far.
But in the OHL, another accusation of sexual assault hit the league in the midst of this week’s meetings after Rick Westhead and W5 spoke with a woman who alleges that she was sexually assaulted by 19-year-old player and seven other OHL players in November 2014.
Crawford said the league learned about it when the story was aired on Wednesday and that “it wasn’t something that anyone in our league or with our teams had been aware of.”
“Obviously, we take it incredibly seriously,” he said. “It takes a lot for someone to come forward that has been a victim of sexual violence and our job is to take that seriously and cooperate with any investigations that occur as we move forward. … We talk about the things that we can control and what we’ve been doing and investing in for nearly a decade when it comes to our ONSIDE program and these sorts of educational programs that we’ve put in place for our players and for our teams that have sought to address these sorts of issues so that we’re developing outstanding young people and community leaders. That’s ultimately our top priority. We were completely shocked like everybody.”
(Photo, from left, of Dan MacKenzie, Dan Near, Mario Cecchini and Bryan Crawford: Josh Kim / CHL)
