Episode Transcript
[00:00:14] Hello and welcome to the first half of week two of Spima 4, p. 97, advanced analysis of the Hockey Industry. This week we will be getting into a more regular rhythm for the course. We're going to be having a lecture from me here in the first half week and a second half guest lecture from Corey Locke of the Guelph Storm and the Burlington City Hockey Club.
[00:00:34] So today's lecture will be about the structure of professional hockey industry and its various leagues, which you have a couple readings online already posted to get started on. So let's get started.
[00:00:48] For the first half of this week, we are going to be getting into the structure of professional hockey. Today. Your reading was about the history, history of professional hockey and expansion and the ways in which the NHL has changed in its earliest years. We're going to be talking today briefly about that reading. We're going to also be talking about the various structures at play when we talk about professional hockey. We're going to talk about what professional hockey means. When we say professional hockey, what exactly does that mean?
[00:01:14] So that's what we're going to be getting into for the first half of week two. And the first thing I want to start by talking about today is the structure and various iterations of professional hockey in general.
[00:01:27] If you've had a chance to look at the slides, you'll see one of the first content slides is a list of junior hockey leagues in North America. And if you're listening to this right now, I'm able to give you a little bit of advice here. That is not a list of leagues and you're going to be tested on all of them. That is not the purpose of this. Hopefully you're listening to this and then rewarded with not having to panic and memorize all of these various leagues. That's not the point.
[00:01:48] We're talking today about the structures of professional hockey in Canada. Now, if you or I should say, you know, in North America and really worldwide in general, a lot of these structures apply quite broadly.
[00:02:00] If you are familiar with hockey, if you're a hockey fan, you likely know about a lot of these leagues. You likely understand what role these leagues play. But if you are a hockey fan, there is a darn good chance that you have lost track of how very, very, very complicated it is to make it to the highest levels of professional hockey in North America. If you are a fan of another sport, if you're a fan of football, for instance, let's just use that as an example. If you're not familiar with football, that's Totally. Okay. But if I asked you, what is the number one way to get to the NFL, what league do you go through? The answer is obvious. It's the ncaa, essentially. That is the only way to make it to the NFL, with very, very, very, very, very few exceptions. And if I said to you, what is the way to get to the NHL, what league do you go through? How many different leagues do you think you could list as a possible route that you could take to making it into the NHL? If I even. That's to make it to the NHL, not even about being drafted, but just making it to the NHL itself.
[00:03:01] There are certainly you could begin, as we look at the list here, you could begin in the Canadian Hockey League with the three main junior hockey leagues, the whl, the OHL, and the qmjhl, the Western League, the Ontario League, and the Quebec Major Junior League.
[00:03:15] You could go the Junior A route, which might take you to the ncaa, depending on your birthday, but that's Junior A. You could play Junior A in every province in the country, with many different leagues spread coast to coast to coast.
[00:03:25] You could play in the USHL, the United States Hockey League, which is a Tier 1 junior hockey league, which preserves amateur status for players. You could play in the North American Hockey League, which is essentially something akin to Junior B. But though it's really hard to understand the direct equivalency between those two leagues, the NA3HL, which is a Tier 3 junior hockey league, often acting as a feeder system with the goal to get to the USHL or the NCAA in the very end. Here you could play Junior B and Junior C and even Junior D in Canada with a goal of hopefully working your way up the ranks. But the purpose of all of this discussion is not to force you to learn all of the various vicissitudes of the Canadian junior hockey system, though many of you probably know a lot about each of those leagues, maybe they have teams in the places that you're from.
[00:04:09] The point is that when we start out here, we need to recognize something. It is very, very, very complicated. It's a very, very, very tricky world to understand.
[00:04:18] It often involves a lot of geographically specific context that inform how you can create this professional infrastructure of hockey in North America. So that's why we began our discussion with what just how many different junior leagues there are. And that is just the discussion of North American junior hockey leagues that offer up a potential pathway to the National Hockey League or in the highest levels of professional hockey. But as the other slide shows, there's an Absolute litany of junior hockey leagues that exist in Europe. Of course, there are the mhl, which is often referred to as the Minor Hockey League or the Transition, the translation from Russian in Russia, the SMSARJA in Finland, the J20 Super Elite and the J20 Elite Junior Leagues In Sweden, there's the Noen Extraliga Junior and the Czech Republic. And there are many, many, many, many other junior leagues, all with the goal of helping get their young players into professional hockey. But here's the interesting thing about comparing those two leagues and those two models. It's this definition of the word professional.
[00:05:23] In North America, we have a very hard time sometimes defining what it means to be professional. It's something that we've struggled to do in sport for a very, very, very long time, is articulate what exactly it means to be professional. You might think this is an easy question. If you're paid to play, right then, then you're a pro. If you're not paid to play, you're not a pro. But what do you mean by pay? Right? If you're provided with the compensation of a scholarship or a stipend or an honorarium, is that considered payment? Or do you have to be cashing a paycheck every week from a specific team?
[00:05:55] This is why the discussion of what it means to be a professional hockey player is extremely important and one that we're going to get into right now.
[00:06:16] So one of the best ways to start this discussion, especially as it relates to junior hockey players, is by trying to get an understanding of what the CHL actually is. The CHL is an unincorporated association consisting of the Western Hockey League, the Ontario Hockey League and the Quebec Ranger Junior Hockey League. And the league currently has 60 franchises, all but eight of which are located in Canada. The three league champions, as well as the host city club compete annually for the Memorial cup first award in 1919.
[00:06:42] The CHL maintains that it is a amateur hockey league, but nonetheless, the CHL and its member teams operate as for profit businesses. This description actually comes from a lawsuit that was filed and then it forced a group of lawyers to take a close eye on what the CHL is. I think it's actually useful sometimes to have a fresh set of eyes to describe this hockey league itself. Again, the maintaining of an amateur status, but operating as for profit businesses is something that's, I think, pretty interesting as well. More from that case. The CHL is the foremost development league for players aged 16 to 20 years hoping to pursue a career in pro hockey. And although the CHL's GMs coaches, trainers and every other team personnel are all paid. The players only receive very modest compensation. CHL players receive small weekly stipends during the season ranging about $50 for first year players to $150 for players in their final year of eligibility.
[00:07:35] Although historically these stipends were paid and taxed as ordinary income, the CHL now characterizes these stipends as expense allowances.
[00:07:45] Some CHL players aged 18 to 20 years old, particularly those who have been drafted into the NHL, will have signed entry level contracts and and while they are not paid salaries under those contracts, unless they have played some NHL games before being reassigned back to their junior team, they usually will have been paid a sometimes quite significant signing bonus.
[00:08:04] NCAA considers the CHL to be a professional league and thus former CHL players are ineligible to play NCAA hockey.
[00:08:13] So I wanted to read that out to you because there's a few things there I wanted to focus on. Number one, when we think of the CHL being a pro league, it is less because players are paid, I should say exorbitant salaries. They're paid very little at all. The value associated with playing in the CHL is the value in the scholarship deals that are offered to them in Canadian universities. You'll hear many people in CHL circles mention that yes, the stipends are barely anything really. It's more the value of the scholarships once they're done doesn't mean a heck of a lot to them while they're playing.
[00:08:46] However, the presence of possibly lucrative deals being signed by NHL draftees in the league renders the entire league as professional.
[00:08:57] So essentially, if you think about it like this, it's less about the professional nature of each individual player and more so about the presence of players at the highest levels of the CHL that makes the league professional as a whole.
[00:09:09] Not to mention the fact that coaches are paid and all that sort of things. But there's many instances of that in other leagues that are considered amateur.
[00:09:15] Now why is this important? Well, pro status is extremely meaningful.
[00:09:19] The idea of what a pro is and who is a pro and who is not is extremely contentious. And the notion that a league would be considered amateur or a league considered professional is extremely important.
[00:09:32] It's also something important to think about here is those ages we mentioned, 16 to 20, because these are student athletes in a very important way. They are student still in grade school in this way. This is again from the case all CHL high school aged players are enrolled in local secondary school, but players 18 years of age and older are frequently not enrolled in any post secondary program or are only enrolled on a part time basis.
[00:09:58] Further, the CHL and its member leagues and franchises are not educational institutions directly providing the players with an education.
[00:10:05] This latter fact constitutes a critical distinction between the CHL litigation and and U.S. cases dealing with NCAA student athletes. The important part that I want to leave in there is it's important to note that the Niagara Ice Dogs, London Knights, the Calgary Hitman, the Brandon Wheat Kings, the Halifax Mooseheads, they are not providing educational opportunities to students directly.
[00:10:29] Essentially, they are providing the opportunity to attain educational opportunities or in the cases of high school age students, they are connecting them with local secondary institutions that provide the education for themselves. So the duty of care, as you'll hear in legal terms, is not as significant when it comes to educational responsibilities for CHL teams.
[00:10:51] However, again, let's think again about professionalism and what it means to be pro and what it means to be a professional and what it means to be an amateur and the way it relates to this sort of discussion.
[00:11:01] So you have some players being offered, you know, very, very little money, some almost nothing at all. And you have some players that have been, you know, offered pretty lucrative contracts through their NHL connections and their NHL drafting.
[00:11:13] Does that make the entire league professional? What do you think? Right? When you hear that, what is your first instinct? Take this moment, I think, to really reflect on that, right? Is the league professional because of the amount of payment given to each player, or is it something else? Is it something about the league itself? Is it the product, the uniform, the experience? Is the pro style? Is there something more esoteric attached to the actual experience of pro hockey that allows the CHL to sort of project an image of professionalism while not really paying the players what you would expect a professional in any field to be paid?
[00:11:46] This question of what a pro is and who a pro is is extremely important to one major organization. Because again, I think generally speaking, when you're considering these questions, this might not be something you really care that much about. Who cares if they're professional or not, or amateur, it really doesn't matter. But if the CHL was to change its rules and become an amateur league, it really would change have to change the way in which it related to the professional leagues themselves.
[00:12:12] They'd have to really change the way that they related to one major institution, and that is of course, the ncaa. Who cares a great deal about amateur status.
[00:12:25] I can't really get into exorbitant detail about. How about the history here of amateurism in Canada. But if you've taken a Canadian sport history course or you have any knowledge in Canadian sport history, there's this very contentious period in Canadian sport history where the fight over who an amateur was led something called the athletic wars. And it was extremely controversial. And there's kind of remnants of it to this very day. And if you are not old enough or I don't expect many of you to. To remember a pre professional at the Olympic model, certainly for hockey or basketball, but this used to exist. You had to be an amateur to go to the Olympics. That included hockey, meaning you couldn't have been paid. But the definition of amateur in the early 20th century was far more severe. He couldn't have even played with anyone else who'd been paid. We talked about this briefly last week.
[00:13:11] So this idea of amateur status and how it applies to professional hockey. Well, let's talk about with relation to the ncaa.
[00:13:18] For the NCAA scholarship athletes, the essential quid pro quo is the exchange of university tuition and related expenses for the student's agreement to play on one of the university's sports teams, for example, football or basketball. So here in the ncaa, the idea is, okay, you're gonna come here, we're gonna give you something. We're gonna give you a quid pro quo. We're gonna give you an exchange. There's an exchange. You come here, we give you tuition.
[00:13:39] Nevertheless, the CHL maintains that its players are amateur student athletes. This raises the key question in CHL litigation. Are CHL players primarily students who play hockey, or are they primarily employees as hockey players who may also be students?
[00:13:57] This is a fascinating question and one that's extremely important for a number of reasons that maybe aren't immediately apparent to you when you're thinking about this topic as a whole.
[00:14:08] Questions like, if they are employees, first and foremost, what are they entitled to? You may have a job right now. Hopefully, you know, you're working safe, and you're able to keep safe from the various things that are after you right now. But if you're working a job right now and you have an employer, or you worked jobs in the past, be that in the summer or during school, you are entitled to certain protections under the law.
[00:14:28] You are entitled to certain things, like a minimum wage, and you're entitled to certain workplace health and safety regulations that go into anyone who working as an employee in Canada.
[00:14:37] These things are not given to CHL players. But this is a tricky sort of negotiation because, okay, at one side, the CHL wants to say, these are amateur student athletes, but The NCAA looks at the CHL and says, well, you have some players who've signed their entry level deals, some first round draft picks who've signed with wealthy signing bonuses that are playing in this league among players who maybe are paid less, but the mere presence of those players who've signed deals. And again, we're going to talk about the entry level deal and the restricted free agencies. We're going to talk about all that kind of stuff as it relates to the NHL a little bit later in this course. But if you're familiar with that, you'll know what I'm talking about. If not, you can hit pause here and have a look at what I mean by entry level deal. But we will talk about that a little bit later on on in the semester. But think about these questions right now as they relate to professional hockey as an industry.
[00:15:25] The ethical, legal, socio, cultural socio, demographic questions that are raised by considering what a professional is.
[00:15:34] So again, considering all this just as a moment of reflection for yourselves here, what do you think the proper designation of a Cho player is? Is their experience of playing Cho hockey more similar to playing as an amateur or a professional? And now I think you're probably a little bit further along in this journey, you can realize the that it's actually not that easy to answer this question.
[00:15:56] Discerning what a professional is and what it looks like and what kinds of experiences are given to professionals is actually kind of tricky to do.
[00:16:04] But one thing that I think is interesting, when they talk about litigation, meaning of course, bringing a suit before the court is okay, well, if the CHL is saying that they're student athletes, okay then are they ensuring that these educational opportunities are first and foremost. And I am not here to tell you that the CHL does not care about education. They do. They care a great deal about it.
[00:16:23] But it's tricky. It's very hard to ensure that these students are being looked after as students. And that's not a problem that just the CHL has.
[00:16:31] But consider again the structures of how the CHL structures their games, how much travel is involved, the schedules.
[00:16:39] It's really, really, really hard to imagine a situation in which you can give your full self to being a student and being a player. Especially if you think about the amount of travel that is associated with playing in a league like the Western League. The Western League has players in Brandon, Manitoba and Victoria, bc. That is an enormous distance to travel for minors age 16 to 18 and then young adults aged 18, 19 and 20.
[00:17:03] All of that is again to force you to reflect on the fact that the structure of professional hockey as it relates to junior players is actually very hard to unpack and very difficult to explain to, to fans of other sports sometimes. And noting what a pro is is also pretty tricky as well. When we listed those European junior leagues, it's quite simple. They're paid. They're not paid as much, but they're paid. The idea of while you're wearing the uniforms of a professional team, you're practicing with a larger professional organization. Of course you are professional. There isn't this notion of major junior hockey. This is a very North American phenomenon. The idea of being an academy player in soccer, if you follow soccer, if you're playing for the U20s in Arsenal or Tottenham or something like that, the idea that you would be somehow amateur because you wouldn't be paid as much is strange. Right? So just things that you take for granted in the game and this is going to be a constant refrain throughout the semester. Things that you think, okay, this is normal. This is just normal about hockey. Something we all know. I want you to really look hard at them. I want you to really consider them. Once you really take some time and think to yourself, is this normal? Why have these come out the way that they have? Why do I think this is normal? I want you to interrogate the things that you think are normal and usual in the game of hockey and certainly in the professional hockey industry.
[00:18:20] And I want to be careful every time that we talk about professional hockey this year. I don't want us to think that, you know, I mean, specifically just the NHL. There's many different forms of professional hockey across the world. In North America, for instance, as you see on the slide there, you got the National Hockey League. You got Minor Professional Hockey League, which is of course the American Hockey League. Then you got the East Coast Hockey League, which used to. There also used to be a West Coast Hockey League, by the way, back in the day. That's why you have the East Coast Hockey League.
[00:18:46] The Southern Professional Hockey League still exists. The Federal Prospects Hockey League, there are a few others. There's a semi professional league in Quebec which is the Lignour d' Americain du Hockey. And it's pretty intense.
[00:19:00] Think Danbury Trashers. But Francophone. And it's a pretty wild league and if you want to check that out on YouTube, you are welcome to do so. Well, maybe some of you have even seen it in person. But it is a pretty, pretty wild times, bit of a throwback league that still exists today. There are many different Opportunities available to players across North America once this sort of professional breach has been, has been made. In terms of women's leagues, I've mentioned a few times, I should say, I will be mentioning a few times professional women's hockey leagues that exist. We're gonna have a visit from a professional hockey player who's actually playing right now in Italy. And the last thing I actually wanted to talk to you about is someone that we're gonna be having come in. He was nice enough to join us last semester. He's joining us again this semester and his name is Pete Soberlak. I'll let you have some time to spell that out. Pete P E T E Soberlack. S O B E R L A K Soberlack.
[00:19:57] Pete's going to be joining us. He's actually an instructor at Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops B.C. and Pete was a former first round draft pick of the Edmonton Oilers in the 1980s. And Pete has a very unique life's journey, has a very unique journey through hockey and a very unique interaction with professional hockey. Pete will be joining us in the upcoming weeks. I just wanted to give you some advance warning in case you had any questions for Pete as he has asked that you send them along. So if you have any questions for Pete, send me an email and I'll ask them to. I'll send them along to him before we talk probably next week, I would think. It's also a part of a panel discussion you're going to be hearing with Sheldon Kennedy. So that's Pete Soberlek. But for next lecture you're going to be hearing a guest lecture from Corey Locke and he'll be sharing his experiences throughout the professional hockey journey. The purposes of these guest lecturers are essentially just to give you a journey through professional hockey, but also again just to make us sensitive to their journeys that they go on and the challenges and the struggles and the uniqueness of the professional hockey journey specifically. So again, any questions for Pete, pass them along via email. You have a second lecture posted on Wednesday. Make sure you've read the articles. There are two this week to read.
[00:21:10] Both are posted on brightspace. There's also a two couple of small little slides that are just explainers regarding the CHL and the echl.
[00:21:21] But that's your readings for this week. Make sure you're referencing them in your audio lectures and your form responses. And I look forward to hearing you your audio responses soon.
[00:21:44] Sam.
