Follow @james_tanner123 The NHL is floating the idea that the draft age should be raised to 19.
Pat Lafontaine came out yesterday and said it was a near consensus among back-room NHL types that this should happen.
That such a greedy and amoral idea should be floated as part of the NHL's (ridiculous) Pope Approved (WGAF?) declaration of principles or whatever lame-ass title they gave it, is hilarious and ironic.
Couched around the idea that it'd be 'best for the development of players' the move to push the draft age to 19 is nothing but pure greed.
NHL Owners would get another year of control of a player, trading it for a year in which hardly anyone makes the NHL.
But even though you might not play in the NHL at 18, you can still get drafted, sign a contract and start earning money.
The draft itself is a scam. It basically takes people with talent so rare that they are instantly allowed to make more money in a single year than their parents are likely to have ever made cumulatively over the past decade, and assigns them to a random team in a random city with no say over how much they sell their talents for.
The NHL obviously feels it can use this same strategy again. Since Pat Lafontaine used to be a player, I guess that makes him a traitor. Or maybe he actually believes it is better for development - I don't believe that, but I guess it's possible.
The NHL should have no right to prevent people who are good enough from playing in their league. 18 year old players are developed enough physically that a lot more of them could probably hack it in the pros than actually get the chance to. In fact, I'd 100% guarantee that.
All this move is designed to do is to get a better deal for the owners. Not to be too cynical, but its easy to see how one party might float this as a 'consensus' long before negotiations of a new CBA occur, in order to get people comfortable with the idea, and then, when negotiations come along, the players now have to take the status quo as something given to them in a negotiation.
The idea of a workplace that lets you beat people up at your job, and which recently gave superstar Duncan Keith a pre-playoff holiday for an insane attack with a hockey stick that would have landed him in jail in any other circumstance, is, frankly, not believable.
To think that have any principles to declare is ridiculous. To think that they want the draft age moved up for moral reasons is laughable.
If they had any morality, they wouldn't place earning limits on young players and there would be no draft.