St. Louis Blues: Lengthy Stoppage Could Implode Minor Hockey

The St. Louis Blues know their status is solid due to television deals and ownership. However, the AHL and ECHL don’t have the same certainty.

The St. Louis Blues are waiting to see if they have the opportunity to defend their Stanley Cup championship. The likelihood of that is positive because the NHL needs their television deal to keep some of the league funding in place.

Some call that selfish and shortsighted. They say the millionaires could survive and nobody should be thinking about sports with everything that is going on.

However, what those people fail to realize is sports is not full of millionaires. There are plenty of players in the NHL that get league minimum or close to it and losing part of a season, or even all of 2020-21 if some people got their wish, would really impact their lives.

Still, those that are firmly in the NHL don’t have to worry. There might very well be changes to the league, such as the salary cap being reduced or salaries rolled back to make up for lost revenue due to however long this stoppage lasts.

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The thing many don’t see, since they focus only on professional sports at the highest level, is this pandemic could easily cripple the minor leagues. That would have a gigantic trickle-up effect.

While finances and salaries might change in the NHL, they know they’ll survive this. The television rights and advertising deals are high enough, even if minuscule compared to other leagues, to keep the NHL afloat.

The AHL, and definitely the ECHL, don’t have those same deals. Those leagues don’t have major television deals and some markets don’t have full-season access to games even on local televison. Much of their coverage goes to the online space, though that differs team to team.

Those leagues and teams depend on game-night revenue to get by. Some teams were barely scraping by on that and made ends meet with their affiliation deals with NHL teams. It is in the NHL’s best interest to keep those teams afloat.

The NHL cannot afford to sustain two leagues in perpetuity though. A sustained stoppage could cripple the minor league system.

The Blues have already proven that a team without a minor league system can be a huge hindrance to player development. Without their own affiliate in the 2017-18 season, the Blues had to scramble to find spots for all their prospects. Famously, Jordan Binnington actually played with the Boston Bruins affiliate the season before he played them in the Stanley Cup Final because of that mess.

The Blues just signed an affiliation with the Springfield Falcons. While Springfield is run pretty solidly, nobody knows how a lengthy stoppage could affect each team. Who is to say the Falcons might not be forced to fold and then the Blues are left with no home for their prospects again?

What if several teams in the AHL are forced to fold? How do 31 or 32 NHL teams find enough spots for all their prospects if there are less than 30 AHL teams?

The ECHL could be in even worse shape. While there is not a ton of movement from that level up to the NHL, you are still stunting development and depriving guys of a place to play.

There is not a ton of money in these leagues to begin with. They did not have any kind of war chest built up for something like this, so the longer the stoppage lasts, the more trouble they are in and the more likely some teams don’t return for whenever sports actually return.

Pro sports at the highest level can talk about resuming seasons because they’ll have access to central locations and possible quarantine housing. The teams in those lower divisions can’t even talk about having seasons or playoffs without fans because they would bathe in the losses.

They absolutely have to have fans in the arenas to make playing viable. This could severely damage the NHL’s future, even if they manage to play this season or next.

If only the NHL can play this season or even all the way through 2020-21, what happens to the prospects? Even if the league allows expanded rosters, you have high-end prospects sitting in the press box and only getting pre-game skates and practices to hone their skills. Can the Blues afford to waste a year of Klim Kostin or Scott Perunovich’s career just sitting around practicing if they cannot make their way onto the regular 2020-21 roster?

And the draft would be non-existent. There is no indication collegiate sports will return soon, so what happens to the guys in college that would have been drafted in 2021? They lose an entire year of playing and developing.

While the NHL has a vested interest in keeping the CHL’s leagues alive, it still cannot sustain that league either. If situations exist where those Canadian junior teams cannot play, how is there a draft at all past 2020?

Without a return to sports, all professional leagues, not just the NHL, lose a year or even years of prospect development and scouting. There is nothing to base drafts off of.

Someone who was a sure-fire first round pick might not even be worthy of drafting any longer. Players might give up sports completely to make a living to support a family.

Most guys that are true prospects in the AHL are young enough to not have families, but there is no guarantee they can wait forever. Eventually, someone has to think of their long-term future and that might not involve sports any longer if there is no opportunity to play.

Perhaps you could do something like European soccer teams and have reserve teams that play one another, allowing top prospects to get playing time against people in their age bracket. This would be more financial expenditure for NHL clubs, so very unlikely.

Social media forums and sports talk radio is full of people saying sports cannot return yet because it goes against the greater good. They see things in a vacuum though.

Nobody is trying to put sports ahead of anyone’s health, or at least sane people are not. However, in the grand scheme, there is a possibility where the infrastructure to the NHL and all pro sports starts to crumble.

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The big leagues have a foundation of these affiliate teams and in the case of hockey, the junior teams too. If college, junior and the minor leagues cannot return and have fans, this could crumble sports as we know it.

This, of course, is a doomsday scenario and hopefully it does not reach that epic proportion. It is a definite possibility though and the longer a shutdown lasts, the more it will affect the return of everything we know from a sports perspective.

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