Push Back Start of Ontario Hockey League Season

The Ontario Hockey League season should moved back to later in the fall so all teams can ice their absolutely best lineups. The OHL should launch their regular season in mid-October rather than at the end of September.

Each and every OHL team has their star players away at National Hockey League training camps and while this has been the case for years, it has never been as impactful as this season due to the World Cup of Hockey. The best on best tournament of the world’s professional hockey players has delayed the start of NHL training camps. This, of course, has resulted in the start of exhibition and regular season games also being moved back. The end result is you won’t be seeing the return of your favourite OHL team’s star players – if they indeed do return – until sometime in November or even later.

The Spitfires started the 2016-2017 OHL regular season with seven key players – Logan Brown, Mikhail Sergachev, Logan Stanley, Juluis Mattinen, Christian Fischer, Jalen Chatfield and Jeremiah Addison – out of their lineup while the visiting Erie Otters were without eight impact players on opening night. The next evening in the Soo the Spitfires were still without that large contingent of game-changing players while the Greyhounds had eight players still away with the pros. And it was also only a couple of days before the start of the regular season that Cristiano DiGiacinto and Tyler Nother returned to the Spits from their respective pro camps in Tampa and San Jose, respectively.

Meanwhile, fans across the OHL are still paying top dollar for what are essentially glorified exhibition games during September and well into October and perhaps even beyond.

By the way, of all the Spitfires still away at pro camps, don’t expect to see Sergachev or Brown – or even Fischer – anytime soon as those thee are likely to not only play in NHL exhibition games but maybe up to nine regular season NHL games – before being sent back to Windsor. And Fischer – who is with the Arizona Coyotes – could even be sent to their American Hockey League affiliate instead of Windsor because he was drafted while he was still a member of the United States National Under-18 Team. I may be in the minority, but I believe he’ll eventually end up back in Windsor.

Anyone attending the October 9 game at the WFCU Centre between the London Knights and the Spitfires and expecting to see the preview of a potential Western Conference Final in next spring’s play-offs can guess again. The Knights sent 16 players off to pro camps earlier this month – an incredible 80 per cent of their team – and they will be missing more than a couple of players still by this would-be showdown comes around. But so will the Spitfires.

About the only conclusion one can draw from the outcome of the game between the Knights, the top-ranked team in the Canadian Hockey League, and the Spitfires, who are rated as the sixth best team in the CHL rankings, is which team has the better junior b team or depth players or young players.

And by the time October 9 rolls around, it’s likely that both the Spits and the Knights will have lost a few guys to teams who don’t have as many players still away and both teams may be farther down the CHL rankings – or maybe not even ranked at all.

Ontario Hockey League fans deserve to see the best on best hockey as often as possible during the regular season. The easiest way to accomplish this is by starting the OHL season later in the fall.