With the changing junior hockey landscape, what will the Memorial Cup look like going forward?
The future of junior hockey has more questions than answers after the most recent Canadian Hockey League season has come to an end.
On Sunday night, the London Knights defeated the Medicine Hat Tigers to win the franchise’s third Memorial Cup.
While most people in southern Ontario are jacked up for a championship, there is the wonder about what the future of the CHL will hold, with major junior hockey players being eligible to compete in the NCAA following their careers in either the Ontario Hockey League, Western Hockey League, and Quebec Maritimes Junior Hockey League.
On Monday’s edition of Daily Faceoff LIVE, Frank Seravalli and Tyler Yaremchuk discuss whether the Memorial Cup will see any altercations in the future.
Tyler Yaremchuk: The Memorial Cup’s never going to go away, but it might never look like this again with the type of players in it.
Frank Seravalli: It’s definitely a changing junior hockey landscape. Some would argue that there’s a chance for major junior hockey to get even more impressive talent that you could pull players from the U.S. that go, instead of playing in the USHL, to the CHL. I don’t know that that will necessarily be the case. I still think the best play for all of junior hockey is to put the USHL on par with the CHL and make it a four-team sort of North American junior league as opposed to just the CHL three-league circuit and then have the USHL have a permanent presence at the Memorial Cup instead of one team as the host, just add in a USHL team.
It’s really not that different people say, ‘Oh, it’s blasphemous having a USHL team compete for the Memorial Cup. Like, there are American teams that have won and hosted the Memorial Cup. The first-ever was the Portland Winter Hawks. So, I don’t know why we would stand on those grounds, even though it’s a sort of Canadian institution, but this landscape is definitely changing.
You can watch the full segment and entire episode here…