When Teens Transition to the NHL

We’ll be hearing plenty about teenage hockey prospects the next several weeks as teams gear up for the NHL Draft next month in Los Angeles.

Fans sometimes roll their eyes at such players, figuring they are years away from helping the NHL club. Among more casual sports fans, there can also be a tendency to automatically assume “bust” if a player fails to make the NHL right away.

It's a flawed view, but mainly due to differences between the various major professional leagues.

The NFL doesn’t really have an affiliated minor league system the way hockey and baseball do. Although nowadays, given name, image and likeness money throughout college sports, the NCAA has become the NFL’s de facto farm system.

Players get drafted almost exclusively out of the NCAA by roughly age 22. If they don’t make an NFL roster by then, their options are to head to the Canadian Football League, an arena league or various other paid-money unaffiliated circuits.

But that’s not a minor league. Top NFL draft picks are expected to make the final 53-man roster right away. Any player development either takes place in college before the draft or at the big-league level.

It’s different in baseball, where players can be drafted out of high school or college. The high school players are still just teenagers and often need a good five years before tasting the big leagues against grown men whereas the college types might take a couple of years. That’s why baseball has an affiliated minor league system.

Hockey is set up much the same way, the exception being – and this is really what’s driving a lot of the misconception about “bust” picks -- all drafted players are typically 18 years old. Some don’t get drafted their first year of eligibility and occasionally do get taken the following summer at age 19.

But just like baseball, they are also competing against grown men at the NHL level and that’s very tough to do for reasons both physical and mental. An 18-year-old player can have all the “hockey sense” in the universe, but their body is still not fully developed physically compared to players in their early to late 20s.

Sure, a handful of truly gifted players have entered the league at 18. Kraken president Ron Francis was one of them, stepping in with the Hartford Whalers for a 68-point season in 59 games the fall after being taken fourth overall in 1981.

But Francis played at a solid 6-foot-3, 200 pounds in an era where players weren’t as big or quick as today’s.

When I was a teenager growing up in the Montreal suburb of Laval, Quebec, our local junior team, the Voisins, featured a guy named Mario Lemieux. We used to take the bus across town to the arena next to a penitentiary, buy standing room tickets for right up at the ice level glass and watch Super Mario in action.

His draft year in 1984, Lemieux stood 6-foot-4 and weighed 230 pounds. That season, he scored 133 goals and added 149 assists in 70 games. For those who like math, that’s a four-point-per-game average.

He was a giant among boys and watching him from ice level emphasized the size part. I was standing by the glass the Monday night in March 1984 when he broke Guy Lafleur’s single-season junior goals record of 130, finishing that game with six goals and five assists against the league’s second-best team from Longueuil. It was 11-0 by the eight-minute mark of the second period and wound up a 16-4 final.

His team clinched the league title that season with a 17-1 victory over the same squad.

When you think of surefire, NHL-ready 18-year-olds, that’s a good place to start. Merely putting up 100 points in a major junior hockey season doesn’t guarantee you’ll withstand the next level.

And that’s just from a physical standpoint. Lemieux, clearly, was a gifted playmaker with hockey sense streaming out of him that was wise beyond his years.

Put that whole package together, that’s a candidate for an 18-year-old NHL debut.

Now, not every 18-year-old has to be a towering future Hall of Famer to make the NHL full-time. But it sure helps. A teenage body often must grow into a man to play into a men’s league.

Kraken center Shane Wright put up 94 points in 63 games his 18-year-old draft season in the Ontario Hockey League as a projected No. 1 overall pick. Pundits proclaimed Wright had nothing more to learn at the junior level, which may or may not have been true and doesn’t really matter now.

What does matter is Wright had yet to grow into the full size and strength an 18-year-old breaking into the NHL typically needs. The guy drafted ahead of him by Montreal at No. 1 overall, Juraj Slafkovsky, was a 6-foot-3, 230-pound winger.

And even Slafkovsky, who’d had professional seasoning in Finland pre-draft, looked somewhat out of place in the NHL at 18 as he put up just 10 points in 39 games.

Wright plays a more demanding center position, was three inches smaller and about 40 pounds lighter. The Kraken tried keeping him up a handful of games with the big club rather than sending him back to junior hockey because he was too young for AHL eligibility.

What eventually helped Wright was getting AHL exposure in the playoffs that 2022-23 season – he was allowed to play because the age 20 minimum doesn’t apply once the junior calendar ends – then a special waiver to go back to that league at age 19 for a full campaign.

In between, he worked out with Kraken fitness consultant Gary Roberts at his Toronto training complex during the summer. This past season, Wright, now 6-feet, 192 pounds of quality muscle and still only 21, put up 19 goals and 25 assists his first full NHL campaign and had the physical confidence to make the most of his above average hockey acumen.

Something to keep in mind this fall as the Kraken give a possible NHL look to last year’s No. 8 overall pick Berkly Catton, 19, a 5-foot-10, 175-pounder in a similar position as Wright of having to make the big team or go back to the Spokane Chiefs for a final junior season.

Young NHL draftees might be considered adults on paper, but most pro sports leagues wouldn’t quite consider them men just yet. And any NHL taste they get while still teenagers is a bonus that should never be held against them in “bust” discussions that could become moot a year later.