The Pain of the QMJHL, the NHL Draft and Marketing

What are we doing wrong? After another painful draft for Quebec hockey, this question is more relevant than ever.

In the first round of the NHL draft Friday night in Las Vegas, Canadian hockey players were extremely popular. Macklin Celebrini was the first player selected and no fewer than 19 Canadians, including one from an Ontario high school, were named by scouts as among the top 32 prospects in the world.

The problem is that the QMJHL was not invited to this party. For a second year in a row, no player from the Quebec major junior circuit was chosen in the first round. While the QMJHL players were eating their black bread, 9 skaters from the Ontario Junior League and 6 players from the Western League were claimed.

In its 55-year history, the QMJHL has never been ignored for two consecutive years in the first round. This sad record is extremely worrying. Since the start of the 2000s, the QMJHL has been ignored 7 times in the first round. The WHL and the OHL have never suffered such disinterest.

To add insult to injury, the only Quebecer selected in the first round, forward Sacha Boisvert (18th, by Chicago), played his entire minor hockey career in Denis Francœur’s development program in Trois-Rivières. Boisvert therefore developed outside of Hockey Québec’s framework before moving to the United States at the age of 14.

That said, let’s go back to the QMJHL and address the killer question: how can there be such a difference in performance between three homogeneous development circuits that are also part of the same league? (The Ontario, Western and Quebec circuits are grouped together within the Canadian Hockey League.)

When I began to document the decline of Quebec hockey, around twenty years ago, I was told that junior hockey was cyclical and that we should not be overly concerned. However, the more the years pass, the more they confirm that, ultimately, the QMJHL is not at all in the same league as the OHL and the WHL.

Over the past three years, here’s how many players from the three Canadian circuits have been selected in the first round:

• Western League: 18 (50%)
• Ontario League: 16 (44.4%)
• QMJHL: 2 (5.6%)

And here are the results since the beginning of the 2000s:

• Ontario League: 173 (44.5%)
• Western League: 151 (38.8%)
• QMJHL: 65 (16.7%)

These figures speak extremely loudly. They are the result of evaluations by the best recruiters in the world. And these recruiters are spread across 32 extremely competitive professional organizations ready to search the most isolated corners of the planet to discover the best talent available.

In the end, 15 QMJHL players were selected this weekend in Vegas. However, only eight of them are Quebecers. The other seven come from either the Maritimes or Europe. By comparison, 39 OHL players and 34 WHL players were selected.

At the close of the draft on Saturday, the QMJHL issued a strange press release. Commissioner Mario Cecchini seemed to sum up the lack of enthusiasm from recruiters as a question of marketing.

[15 joueurs sélectionnés, c’est] better than last year [12], and our 2025 and 2026 vintages look promising. As a league, we would always like more players to be drafted, and we will continue to work very hard in this direction. We must continue to talk about our best players so that NHL scouts and teams take even more interest in them.the commissioner pleaded.

The rest of the press release also seemed to make a strange amalgamation between the fact that the Philadelphia Flyers (whose GM is Daniel Brière), the Utah team (whose coach is André Tourigny) and the Ducks of Anaheim (whose chief recruiter is Martin Madden Jr.) have all bet on players from the QMJHL.

What exactly did we want to imply?

One thing is certain: if we hope that the solution lies in some form of cronyism or if we consider that organizations that do not have a Quebec decision-maker do not see the light, the situation will continue to deteriorate.

If the structure of Quebec hockey is no longer or not sufficiently efficient, more and more parents who have talented children will look for alternatives elsewhere. This will have the effect of making the system even less likely to develop great talents. And we will find ourselves in a spiral from which it will be very difficult to escape.

This phenomenon is already well underway. There are already hundreds of Sacha Boisverts who are moving to the United States or Ontario to bypass the planned path in Quebec. During the last QMJHL draft, many people noted that the first player selected, Maddox Dagenais, had been playing in Ontario since he was 14 years old.

Adopting punitive rules to prevent athletes from choosing their course is not a valid solution. The only possible path is to make Quebec hockey at least as efficient and as stimulating as elsewhere.

How could this be accomplished? That is the other killer question.

The creation of a permanent Team Quebec program, similar to the American development program (NTDP), would be a huge step forward.

Bringing together the best talents during a critical phase of their development, supporting them optimally while exposing them to high-level competition is a recipe proven by numerous federations (all disciplines combined) both in Canada and around the world. .

Renovating the top of the current structure would not hurt. But the political and economic backroom games are so strong that any questioning seems impossible.

History teaches us that there have never been as many Quebecers who played regularly in the NHL (66) as in the early 1990s, when the province’s best prospects were learning in a midget AAA league composed of 7 teams. Each midget AAA team was then supplied by a pool of more than 2,200 pee-wee-age players (M13) and the QMJHL was composed of only 10 or 12 teams.

The QMJHL, for economic reasons, then embarked on several waves of expansion. Since 2006, the major junior league has had 18 teams. And to keep up, Hockey Québec has gradually weakened its most precious jewel by increasing the number of midget AAA teams (M18 AAA) from 7 to 15. Over the last two years, the M13 player pools that fed the midget AAA teams were around 800 players, or only 36% of the pools that existed at the end of the 1980s.

Do the math: because the number of Hockey Quebec members has decreased, the number of M18 AAA teams would have to be reduced from 15 to 5 to achieve a level of competition as high as at the height of Quebec hockey.

The same kind of calculation applies to the QMJHL. The OHL and WHL draw their players from pools of 148,000 and 164,000 players respectively. The latest survey indicated that approximately 77,000 male players play hockey in Quebec. By adding the small federations of the Maritimes, we arrive at a pool of approximately 114,000 players to supply the QMJHL.

Ultimately, there are only 36 Quebecers who play regularly in the NHL, four of whom were trained in the United States.

Knowing this, it is not far-fetched to conclude that we are dealing with a systemic problem rather than a marketing problem. The rosters of the QMJHL and the U18 AAA League are too diluted to consistently develop young top players.

Who will finally have the courage to play in this?