Episode Transcript
[00:00:17] Speaker A: 4P97 welcome to week four's worth of course content. This week we're gonna have a couple guest lectures, including one today from Ryan Creeland, the commissioner of the East Coast Hockey League. We discussed the East Coast Hockey League briefly in our discussion of the structure of professional hockey, and it'd be great to hear his experiences. He was a sport management student as well at one point in his life and his journey to becoming the highest, high, most important figure inside the echl. Before that, we're going to have a brief lecture titled Hockey, who do you play for? And this describes the conditions that create fandom, the conditions that create allegiances to particular teams. So make sure you have a look at those slides as they are now posted on brightspace. We're going to be talking about hometown heroes, national treasures, all that good stuff before we talk to Ryan. So let's get started. We don't have any time to waste, so let's begin our discussion of hockey. Who do you play for? You have your slides in front of you. You can go through as I'm going through them. If not, that's okay if you want to look at them a little bit later on, but make sure you do look at them and make sure you are referencing them them when you do your critical engagement questions.
So first off, hockey and industry, this is something that we've talked about briefly, certainly as we discussed the development of hockey so far throughout the 20th century. But moving the game indoors meant that organized hockey began to be shaped by the economic realities of the late 19th century. The way in which hockey was played certainly reflected a changing society outside of the rink. As John Matthew Barlow contends, quote, the development of a scientific style of play can be seen as keeping step with the modernization of society as a whole at the turn of the century in Montreal and urban industrial Canada in general. This is a really fascinating sort of part of hockey development.
Now, again, we associate hockey again with perhaps playing it the way that we played it in community rinks indoors. But I think again, as we discussed a little bit last week, there is this sort of notion that hockey is also an outdoor game played on ponds. Organized hockey itself was industrialized during the late 19th century. It was brought indoors. It was moved into a space that was regularized. It was, it was commoditized. It was a place of doing business.
This is a really important moment in the development of hockey history, but it also changes the way the game is played as well. Barlow's argument is essentially that once the game got moved into these regularized spaces and commoditized and tickets started being sold and the professional game sort of starts to take over. The actual style of play changes to, becomes more mechanized, becomes more reliant on team play, becomes less reliant on individual brilliance. And the sorts of team tactics that we see developing throughout the late 19th and early 20th century revolutionize the way that the game of hockey was played.
So hockey begins to evolve during this period and in Central Canada. Hockey had existed as an institution since at least 1887 with the formation of the Amateur Hockey association of Canada. For furthermore, professional hockey roots. Hockey's roots date back to 1904 and the creation of the International Hockey League, the IHL, which is not to be confused with the later iteration of the ihl. That's not important. Just know that the. The history of professional hockey in Central Canada goes back a long way. According to Dan Mason and Duquette, high caliber hockey was moving away from its. From its organizational and participatory roots under the surveillance of white, middle and upper class English speaking men in the large urban centers of eastern Canada towards a more popularized commodified entertainment spectacle, participated in, watched and appreciated by different social groups.
At this stage, hockey entered into the symbolic realm of the Canadian cultural consciousness. So at this point we are moving it away from the country club sort of atmosphere it had from beginning in 1875 when there's earlier days. But then again, we'll discuss to what extent that has actually been altered and into a more popularized version of a game, A game that we would probably recognize a little more today. So really what I want to talk about this notion of hockey players and the teams they represent as synecdoche. There's a word on your slide there.
[00:04:19] Speaker B: It's slide four.
[00:04:21] Speaker A: Synecdoche. S Y N E C D O C H E.
That's a figure of speech in which a part is made to represent the whole. So essentially if I say Toronto won by five runs, what I mean to say is the Toronto Maple Leafs or sorry I should say the Toronto Blue Jays won by five runs or the Toronto Maple Leafs won by five goals. That's the sort of use of synecdoche.
As hockey evolved in Canada, players not only played for their respective teams, but also became symbolic representatives of oftentimes competing stakeholders, communities or interests. These include hockey players as hometown heroes, national treasures or sporting commodities. And that's we're going to talk about today, these three ways of understanding hockey players. It is synecdoche. Your player stands in for a community. Now this is really important when you're discussing the way the industry functions as a whole. And we're going to get into that a little bit today. If you're on slide 5 now, you can see a picture of Sidney Crosby in Coal Harbor. And if you're. Again, when you look through the slides, you'll be able to see them. But if you're just listening to this on Spotify or on your browser and you can't see it, Sydney's sitting in front of the Stanley cup and the Conn Smythe Trophy in front of a giant sign that says home of Sidney Crosby. Welcome to Cole Harbor. Congratulations, Sidney. We proudly await the Cup.
This is this notion of hometown heroes building characters. This is an incredibly important notion to connect with hockey, especially as you see the way the game has been marketed, which is the way in which the industry functions as a whole and the way in which your place will function within this hockey ecosystem. As we move through our material this week, I want you to be sensitive to these concepts. It might inform your writing. It might inform the way you write about your. During your critical analysis project a little bit later on. But it certainly is important to consider the way that fans have a relationship with certain players.
So clearly, when we talk about Sidney Crosby and we talk about Canada as a whole, the idea of a player being from a specific location and therefore representing that location is incredibly important, not just in hockey, but across sports. A really a relatively easy concept to get across, the notion of Coal harbor and Sidney Crosby and Nathan McKinnon. If you're not familiar with Coal harbor, if you've never been to Coal harbor, perhaps you have. Maybe we have some Maritimers in this class right now. But if you're aware of the geography of that part of the country, I think in our minds, we picture Coal harbor to be a relatively small area. It's relatively remarkable that Sidney Crosby and Nathan McKinnon both came from this location. But if you know something about Halifax, just for instance, this location, Coal harbor, is basically a part of the Halifax Regional Municipality. And it's not necessarily a small town. It's actually a pretty nice little part of the. Of Nova Scotia. It's no real mystery as to why the players, why these two players, if they're going to come from a part of Halifax, come from here. But it doesn't fit necessarily with the narrative of being from a small town in Nova Scotia. So this, again, is very important in terms of the way that we're going to be describing the relationships between sporting characteristics and national characteristics and Local characteristics. So I guess again, if you have a look at the slides, you'll know that we're going to be using Sidney Crosby for all three examples here. But you can picture in your mind other examples of other players. So, first of all, he's the hometown hero, he's from Cole harbor, he represents small town Canadian values. This is again the example of Sidney Crosby moving on to national treasures. Hockey players as cultural ambassadors.
This is another really important part of the way in which Canadians relate to their hockey players. It's important, especially once you pass a certain threshold. If you've represented the country, if you've worn the maple leaf, if you have achieved for Canada at that level, they cease to be the representatives of just any specific locality and just a specific community and become representatives of an entire nation. This endows them with a great amount of strength, but it comes with a large amount of responsibility.
Hockey Canada certainly considers very deeply who it is that will represent the nation when it comes to representing Canada. Maybe perhaps in recent years they've had to reconsider who is worthy of this privilege. But the point is, when you're endowed with the nation's emblems, when you're endowed with the ability to represent the country, cultural ambassadors begin to be formed. Now, again, there is nothing about perfecting your craft as an athlete that can prepare you or makes you of the correct moral character to be a cultural ambassador. It is a very difficult position to put aside. Athletes in oftentimes they are not equipped to deal with this type of pressure, doesn't mean necessarily that they are bad people if they aren't able to sort of hold the mantle of Canadian cultural identity on their shoulders as they represent our country. But again, keep in mind the amount of enormous amount of weight we place on hockey players when they are representing our country for this reason.
And the last thing I want to bring up with with Sidney Crosby here is the sporting commodities. Now, again, if you have your slides and flight front of you, you'll have a look at Sidney Crosby and his various ad campaigns. He is a large spokesman for a number of different products in the hockey space right now.
He has had, over the last 20 years or so, he's had a few campaigns that are some more memorable than others. Now, if I asked you to imagine in your minds what is the sort of Sidney Crosby brand?
So I said, again, if you're not familiar with Sidney Crosby, you can have a look at him online here. You can YouTube them. If you are familiar with Sidney Crosby, what is his brand? I know it's a bit of a nauseating question if you break people down, individual human beings into their brand identity. But if you had to think of something that Sidney Crosby represents. Right. What are some of the words that would come to mind?
So take a moment to sort of imagine those things.
These are things that. These are real discussions that occur in Sidney Crosby's management team and occurred, I'm sure, in Sidney Crosby's own household. I mean, he's deciding what products to endorse. But again, he is associated with stability. He's associated with reliability, with kindness, with generosity. These are attributes that he has aligned himself with in a corporate space. Does that reflect Sidney Crosby's true personality? I have no idea. Right. I have no clue. That's not really the point here. So if you have a look at the slide here, I've picked three campaigns here. The Reebok campaign. Reebok is now out of the hockey space. But when he first broke into the league, this was one of his most aggressive campaigns as his being an ambassador for Reebok hockey. Tim Hortons. Now, his relationship with Tim Hortons goes back a long time. Tim Hortons tries to use the sort of same cultural emblems often as in their marketing. Sidney Crosby being the logical choice. But perhaps my favorite Sidney Crosby campaign is also on the slide here. Sidney Crosby was the spokesperson for Dempster's bread, and he was essentially a spokesperson for multigrain bread.
And if you had to think of a safe, reliable, non intrusive, non controversial product to market, multigrain bread, sliced bread might be among the safest products to associate your brand with. Now, again, none of these things are accidental. None of these things are done without purpose. And Sidney Crosby's decisions have been very, very, very successful for him. And I'm not here to say that, you know, okay, well, we have to change the way that hockey players are marketing themselves and all of these sorts of things. That's not really the purpose of. Of the. What I want you to take from this sort of introductory level lecture to the notion of representation in athletes in general.
What I do want is you to become sensitive to these types of decisions and the types of burdens that are placed on these athletes, and again, perhaps even our disappointment when they don't live up to these specific standards. Now, Sidney Crosby is perhaps one of the most successful examples, perhaps the most successful example I can think of to embody these three core characteristics. And that being, again, the hometown hero, the national treasure, and the sporting commodity. Sidney Crosby is ostensibly all three things at once. He's captain of the Canadian national team. He's from the Coal harbor, he represents Cole harbor, and he is an exquisite brand ambassador. Okay. But again, it is very important to consider what it is that goes into these types of decisions, how these decisions are made, how these alignments are created. And the last slide that I want to leave you with here is from a poem about hockey players from 1965. Because I think we have an illusion in our minds when it comes to this sort of commodified relationship between modern athletes and brands or teams or cities or countries. That is a modern condition, something that we created. It's a function of our 21st century obsession with the corporatizing of modern sport. But this is from 1965. I want to read you a poem here and I think you'll understand the connection. The entirety of the poem is on slide 8 of your slides for this week.
This is from Al Purdy.
Your aching body stretched on the rubbing table thinking of money in owners pockets that might be yours. The butt slappin camaraderie and the self indulgence of allowing yourself to be a hero and knowing everything ends in a potbelly out on the ice.
Can all these things be forgotten in swift and skilled delight of speed roaring out the end boards, out the city and up high where laconic winds whisper litanies for a fevered hockey player or racing breast to breast and never stopping over rooftops of the world and all together sing the song of winning together sing the song of money all together.
So again, the point here is this poem. Al Purdy is describing the condition of being a professional hockey player and the sacrifices entailed. But again, also the commercialism that goes along with it. This is not something that is a function only of a post lockout world or of a post billion dollar Rogers television deal. This is something that has been going on forever we've been trying to contend with. What is the relationship between professionalism, commodification and the individual athlete itself? Who do these athletes represent? Do they represent our cities? Do they represent our countries? Do they represent our brands? Do they represent our corporations? Do they represent our commercial desires, our national desires? Is it all of above? That's where I want to start this discussion here. And it might seem a little strange to transition for that into the commissioner of the East Coast Hockey League. But I want you to consider when you're listening to Ryan, how does he talk about his relationship with ECHL fans? Specifically, how does he mention that ECHL fans are created? And how does he Mention or how does he refer to his attempts to grow the league in general? So enjoy this conversation with Ryan. I had a great time talking with him.
We are extremely fortunate to be joining by Echo commissioner Ryan Creeland.
[00:14:58] Speaker B: Ryan, thank you so much for joining us.
[00:15:01] Speaker C: Yeah, no, great to be here.
[00:15:02] Speaker B: Ryan, can you tell me about your earliest experiences in hockey? How did you first get involved with the sport of hockey in general?
[00:15:11] Speaker C: So I am born and raised in New Jersey, and at the time there actually wasn't much ice.
However, I had some older cousins who I looked up to and they played roller hockey, which in my hometown happened to, just by pure happenstance or coincidence, catch fire. And they built three hockey roller rinks that were free, so boards, penalty boxes, nets, and essentially, while there were organized games and leagues that played there, outside of that, you could just hop on and play.
And so we grew up as kids just playing roller hockey from morning till night.
Again, you know, our parents would drop us off and there'd be 10, 20 kids and then we'd get picked up.
[00:16:11] Speaker A: So you start with roller hockey as.
[00:16:12] Speaker B: Your first entry point into the sport of hockey.
[00:16:14] Speaker A: That's fantastic.
[00:16:15] Speaker B: What, when did you start thinking to yourself, you know, I'd like to pursue a career in ice hockey?
[00:16:21] Speaker C: Yeah. So, I mean, as I got older, I did start to play ice. A little bit more ice became available.
But listen, I knew from early on if I was going to work in hockey, it would be off the ice, not on the ice.
And school wise, I think I had a passion for sports and the sports business.
And then I guess when you get into high school, start thinking about, you know, how can you parlay that into a career? And was fortunate enough to find that Seton Hall University in New Jersey had a really well positioned sport management program.
And so I guess to answer your question again, I mean, early on knew that I wouldn't be a professional athlete, but in high school, started to piece together different concepts and find a program that I thought would work for me. And, you know, long term here, looking back, I think it certainly did work out fantastic.
[00:17:24] Speaker B: And your first experience with the ECHL was, I believe, as an intern, is that correct? How did you sort of find your way into the echl?
[00:17:32] Speaker C: Yeah, so my senior year at Seton Hall University, you did have to complete some sports internships to graduate. I had already completed the ones necessary to graduate.
However, my advisor at the time had denoted that a position at the ECHL had opened.
I didn't know much about the league at the time, but a former Seton hall alum was in the team services department and was looking for assistance. And I had a very candid relationship with my advisor at that time. And essentially she told me I was taking the internship whether I liked it or not.
And so I did. And, you know, it wasn't easy. I was playing club hockey at Seton hall, and it was about an hour's away, and it was a pretty big commitment amongst everything else that I had going on.
But again, certainly looking back here, I think it's worked out.
[00:18:38] Speaker B: What were your first impressions of the Echo when you. When you first started that internship?
[00:18:44] Speaker C: Wow. It's a good question.
I mean, you know, I took it very seriously in a professional organization, and at the time, I think there may have been 25 teams, although I'm not certain of that. Certainly 25 different teams over the course of the past two decades here.
But hold on, just give me one second there.
Yeah, I started to realize, you know, this was the professional world and this is what a career in sports is all about. Again, I had done some other internships, notably in the concert industry, but, you know, now I felt like I was in the big times.
And it's still a small organization when you compare it to major pro sports and the number of employees that they have versus our model.
But again, looking back, I was excited to be there and get started.
[00:19:58] Speaker B: And I know a lot of our students are extremely familiar with hockey, but they might not be familiar with the ECHL and its model in general. How do you describe the ECHL to someone who's. Who's never heard of it?
[00:20:10] Speaker C: Yeah, so I would tell you it's. It's twofold, maybe, maybe threefold in the fact that the.
From a hockey perspective, you know, we are the double A level in North America. Right. We have really cemented ourselves as the development league to the American Hockey League and the National Hockey League. All of our teams are affiliated. We've been fortunate enough to be growing here a bit. So we're up to 28 teams, and we've got more NHL and NHL contracted players on our roster than ever again to help develop to the next level. So. And that's, that's certainly players, but coaches, front office personnel, equipment managers, trainers, I mean, all of them can get their professional career started in the ECHL and work their way up.
So that's from a hockey perspective. From a business perspective, though, we are much more than just hockey. In fact, because we're a development league, because we don't necessarily have the star power or even consistency of rosters, mind you, our Rosters will change over once, over the course of a season with call ups and all sorts of moving pieces.
So we really pride ourselves from a business perspective on entertainment and community and you know, perhaps rooting more for that hometown crest on the front than the name on the back. So you've got an opportunity to come out and see some future stars of hockey while they're young and in development.
But they may not be there for long.
And so it's about, you know, rooting for your hometown team, being proud of, of your, your hometown team, enjoying the hockey product, which perhaps we'll all be a bit biased here in this class, but when you experience live hockey, I don't think there's anything like it, you know, compared to other sports.
And so while we're very proud of our on ice product, you know, we take in the full entertainment experience. So the moment you walk in the door to when you leave, it's all about the entertainment.
And again, coming back to that hometown mentality being a community asset. So you want people to take pride in their team, want to support the team and they're going to see you out about in the community. So it's not just, hey, buy a ticket and come see us. We should be responsible to come back and see you. So a lot of our teams do school reading programs.
A number of our teams do school day games, which are like 10 or 11am day games. And they work with the schools and the superintendents to bus kids out. It's a field trip for the kids. But there's some educational or STEM learning built into the program.
A lot of our teams do hospital visits. Teddy bear toss is obviously huge across all of minor development league hockey.
So, you know, those are just a couple of concepts. But the point being is 365 days a year we should be giving back to those who help support us.
[00:23:22] Speaker B: That's a fantastic statement and it's something that I think I will ring true to those working across the sport industry. Certainly, you know, minor league baseball, that comes to mind as well. That same sort of model of developing connections with community.
[00:23:34] Speaker A: One of the things that you sort.
[00:23:35] Speaker B: Of alluded to this a little bit earlier with some of the challenges that have been faced with roster turnover and things like that with developmental leagues in general, that is a huge challenge that many organizations face. Can you speak to some of the other challenges that are unique perhaps to the ECHL that ECHL franchises face or echo markets face in maybe post Covid world and beyond?
[00:23:57] Speaker C: Sure. I mean, so from an on ice product Standpoint, I mean, your roster is your product, and from an affiliate standpoint, you're going to be assigned a set number of NHL prospects, but those are their players, so when they want to call them up, they can call them up.
And because of the way our collective bargaining agreement works, even players on ECHL contract can be called up at any time.
So your on ice product can change night to night. You're out there trying to win for your fans and put on a good show and, you know, as the players try and develop their career, and don't get me wrong, we want to see them develop their career. That's good for everybody. But on a nightly basis, that could impact the roster that you're putting out there. That's why we need to focus on the entirety of the entertainment, because, again, we don't necessarily always control all the guys on our roster. We could be missing a few, given a phone call and a call up from other challenges. I mean, listen, at the end of the day, our business is based on. On live fan interaction. That's what made Covid so detrimental. I don't know if there's another industry that was as impacted as minor league sports because we're so dependent on the live attendance of the fan. The ticket sale, the concessions, the parking, the merchandise.
While we certainly are proud of some of our TV and streaming, we don't have the lucrative national deals that are out there that, you know, supported some of the major league sports during the pandemic. And so we pride ourselves on bringing people together again, coming back to that community mantra. And we couldn't do it during COVID Now, the good news is that, you know, I don't know if Covid will ever go away, but, you know, I think we're past the taboo and the pandemic phase of it, and we've seen crowds return.
I think people want to get out and be together and have experiences.
Perhaps that's the silver lining of COVID is that folks realized how much they missed that.
So we've been able to embrace that. We've seen a bump in attendance, which is phenomenal, but we've got to keep that going. We got to keep entertainment fresh. We got to keep people excited and wanting to continue to buy a ticket, to come back.
You know, if they just buy one ticket, that's not a sustainable model. We need folks to, you know, want to continue to come back.
Not some folks. 36 games a year, meaning a full season ticket, is the right fit. That's not for everybody.
But we want people to say, you know what, it's Friday night, Saturday night, let me see if the team's in town and go enjoy the experience.
[00:26:59] Speaker B: Let's speak a bit more about that sort of characterization of your fans. How would you describe this sort of Echo fan? When you're, when you're talking to sponsors or you're looking to, to. To create partnerships, how would you describe a typical Echo fan?
[00:27:14] Speaker C: So I mean we certainly have our market research and demographics, but I think first off we pride ourselves on being family friendly, fun and so trying to provide an environment where mom, dad and the kids can come out and enjoy the game.
We also try and provide a welcoming environment.
Certainly groups that may be non traditional to the sport of hockey, trying to broaden our approach and educate different groups on the game of hockey. I think that's one of the biggest struggles is that if you don't understand the game, people automatically just write it off and say, oh, I'm not a hockey fan. But they've never really experienced it.
So trying to welcome new fans.
But I think that's the beauty of being a community asset. Our job isn't to single out a particular target market. In our arenas we have suites, we have premium areas, we have club areas.
There's something for everyone.
We just need to be out there providing that welcoming mantra to let everybody in the community know that you can become an ECHL fan. And if you don't have, if you don't have a local sport or something you into latching onto your local team can be a lifeline for some folks. It gives them a chance to get out of the house and be a part of something they may not have otherwise had the opportunity to be a part of.
[00:28:48] Speaker B: That's fantastic. That's a great way of characterizing that as well. And returning to one of the things that you mentioned I thought I found very interesting here is that that mix between development and community asset, and that's something that when you speak to people that are working in minor league baseball or in the American Hockey League, this is a constant sort of struggle is, you know, trying to develop players, trying.
[00:29:08] Speaker A: To serve this sort of big clubs.
[00:29:10] Speaker B: Mandates while also trying to develop community relations can be a very tough sort of balance. And how does the Echo balance its role as a, as a developmental AA league mixed with what you just described is trying to connect with communities as well.
[00:29:24] Speaker C: Yeah, I suppose that's the beauty of our roster setup and our cba. So you're going to get assigned again a number of NHL or AHL prospects that are on those contracts to your roster. But then you can also sign the balance of your roster to ECHL contract.
And those allow our ECHL teams the flexibility to sign the guys that they want, potentially sign a few veterans, guys that will, you know, they're not looking to move up anymore. They're. They're looking to continue their professional hockey career.
But the, you know, the odds of them getting called up have sailed. And so those are really the bedrock players that quite honestly, not to say that this is 100% by any stretch of the means, but those are usually the guys that make their home after they retire in the city that they played in. So they were there five, six, seven years, really put down roots in the community, maybe got married and end up staying there for the rest of their career. And I think that's kind of unique when you look not just in the echo, but around minor league sports cities in general. How many athletes end up staying in the town that they played for four or five, six years? So to answer your question, from a community standpoint, I think that's how you build because we have that roster flexibility.
You know, we can develop NHL AHL prospects. We can sign ECHL prospects that are, you know, either didn't get drafted or coming out of university or major junior and aren't on anybody's radar. Give them a chance to get notice at the ECHL level, maybe sign an NHL AHL contract, but then also have those ECHL veteran players who again are can be bedrocks for the team and in the community.
[00:31:19] Speaker B: Wonderful.
[00:31:20] Speaker A: Thank.
[00:31:20] Speaker B: That's extremely helpful, I think, for all of us trying to sort of place the ECHL's model moving forward. Now, you've been with the ECHL for, you know, a decade plus here, 15 years plus.
What changes have you noticed in the sort of development structure? I think the ECHL has been established as a legitimate professional pathway for a number of years now, especially among goaltenders. You see how many goaltenders have spent time in the.
Have you noticed any other development trends occurring within the echl? Are NHL teams using the ECL more effectively over the past five or six seasons, or is there, is there other changes that you've observed more recently?
[00:31:52] Speaker C: Yeah, so I've been around a long time and if you want to go back even further than that, I mean, listen, I don't stray away from it. The old East Coast Hockey League was known as a rough and tumble league and you know, you had goaltenders and enforcers. But I can tell you from when I started, that started to melt away and at this point, it's almost completely melted away.
We have so much skill and speed in our league now. It's. It's unbelievable.
And I think hockey's development pipeline in general has just really become more vertically integrated and we're seeing more NHL teams invest in their Echo clubs. I mean, we have one team that's got 15 or 17 affiliated players assigned to them, which is almost your entire roster. Now that's not every team, but I think we're going to continue to see that. In fact, this season we had 39 more NHL AHL contracts to start the season than we did last year. So we're seeing more assigned players.
We're also seeing more of our ECHL contract players get called up because more folks at the NHL AHL are paying attention to our league and scouting our league further. And we're really getting some of the best talent, or at least developmental talent again once they come out of university or major junior for a chance to be noticed and, and move on up.
I think we've cracked down on some of the old rough and tumble stuff. And I think again with that vertical harmonization, there's definitely a distinction between the NHL, ahl, echl, but the line between the three leagues is very slim. And that's why you see so much movement as you move up from the ECHL to the AHL to the NHL.
[00:33:49] Speaker B: I mean, speaking to that skill, I mean, it's something that we deal with at U Sports hockey all the time as well. There's a lot of youth sports athletes who end up on Echo contracts. And just trying to educate the sporting public in Canada is a chore sometimes where you're like, look, you sports athletes are. It's not like it was in the 80s. Like, these are extremely high level players who end up playing professional a lot of the time. But the question is always, how do you get people exposed? So on that same topic, how can we as a sort of hockey hive mind here in this class, how can we spread the sort of gospel of the Echo? How can people get involved in spreading the ECHL's footprint?
[00:34:30] Speaker C: Well, I mean, as it relates to Canada, unfortunately, over. We've only had four teams in Canada in our history, two current.
So I recognize that we may not have, you know, put ourselves on grand scale in Canada with the vast majority of our teams being in the U.S. but from a player perspective, we're about 50. 50.
That's probably more like 48. 48 with a couple coming from overseas. But in terms of U.S. players and Canadian players. So I think, you know, Watching where a lot of Canadian players, major, junior or university players end up, you'll find that they end up in the echl. And then you can start to tune in and find out more about our league. Again, we have 28 teams, so not quite 32 with the NHLHL yet, but we're getting close.
All of those teams are affiliated and if you tune in either on a nightly basis or a weekly basis to either flow hockey to watch some of our games or, or just follow the league on a day to day basis, we aren't the NHL, but we are who we are. We are that aa developmental league and I think you'll find it to be entertaining hockey. In fact, I often hear that we're more entertaining than some of the other leagues because there's breakdown in plays and things are exciting.
Our teams aren't necessarily playing very defensive hockey, so it can be exciting hockey. We also, in our league, we try and be a little bit, I don't know, progressive in the fact that. So the shootout again a decade plus ago started in, in the ECHL before it was adopted by other leagues. We're actually trying 7 minute overtime versus 5 minute overtime.
We're seeing more games ended in the 7 minutes versus 5 minutes. Makes sense, right? But we're tracking those statistics and just trying to not only develop players, but develop the game as well.
So again, to answer your question, how can you spread the word? I mean, I think become a fan of the ECHL and the way to do that is to follow us and you'll, I think you'll be entertained by the product and you know, that's how we spread the word is you, you become interested in the product, learn more about it and then you tell folks about it.
[00:37:12] Speaker B: Fantastic. Commissioner Greeland, one last question before we go. How do you see the future of the ECHL evolving over say the next.
[00:37:18] Speaker A: Five to 10 years?
[00:37:19] Speaker B: I love that you brought in this sort of hockey laboratory that the ECHL has been for so many years now, where many of the great ideas that we see in the NHL now are tested in a professional environment. First in the echl, how do you see the game sort of evolving in the echo over the next 10 years?
[00:37:35] Speaker C: Yeah, so I think minor league hockey has changed tremendously in the past 20 years or 25 years. I mean, I don't know how much you know about, but I mean there was the ECHL, the CHL, the old West Coast League, the IHL, the AHL, a lot of HLs, let's put it that way. And that's really consolidated over the past 20, 25 years. And you now have the NHL at 32 teams. You have the ah, at 32 teams, the ECHL at 28. So in five to 10 years, I do think there's a very strong likelihood that you'll see the ECHL get there as well. And that will really cement the pipeline of 32, 32, 32. I think again, over the past two decades it's been so scattered. While there was always probably a desire for that, there was just too many moving pieces to get that organized.
But that's certainly within a grasp here over the next half decade. So I think you'll see that unfold. And then if you have 32, 32, 32, you've got that straight affiliation model. And because of that organization and the spotlight put on the ECHL again, I think you're just going to continue to see more players come out of our league. We're not just goaltenders and enforcers anymore.
We are a true place to develop players. And again, not just players, coaches as well. We have I think, seven NHL head coaches that were in the echl.
And as we've developed that pipeline even more in the future, I think that number is going to continue to grow.
[00:39:24] Speaker A: Fantastic. Commissioner Greenland, thank you so much for.
[00:39:26] Speaker B: Joining us here in Florida 4P97 at Rock University. On behalf of all of our students.
[00:39:30] Speaker A: I want to thank you for your time.
[00:39:32] Speaker C: Yeah, thank you for having me.
