CHL Considering Banning European Goalies In Favor of Canadians
By Josh Hill
The CHL is considering a move that might not make too many European hockey players happy. According to the Toronto Star, the CHL is considering banning netminders who hail from Europe in favor of young rising stars in their own country.
“The CHL has had discussions in a broader sense with Hockey Canada,” CHL commissioner David Branch told the Toronto Star. “One of the ideas put forward was eliminating goalies from the annual import draft to allow more focus on North American goalies.”
Hockey Canada is growing more and more concerned that young Canadian netminders are getting shutout of chances to become stars because the opportunities are going to European players. There’s also the matter of the lack of Canadian netminders in the NHL as most players hail from either the United States or Finland.
InGoal Magazine points out this very fact, as three of the finalists for the Vezina Trophy, which honors the best goalie in the NHL, were from European countries and there remains only one starting netminder in the Stanley Cup playoffs from Canada in Chicago’s Corey Crawford.
Henrik Lundqvist, Antti Niemi and Sergei Bobrovsky are the three Vezina Trophy finalists while Jonathan Quick remains the best netminder in all of hockey. Non of those players are Canadian and only one of them (Jonathan Quick) is from North America. Tuukka Rask is playing lights out for the Boston Bruins but he’s a Finnish native leaving Crawford as the only Canadian left in the postseason — next to Marc Andre-Fluery who was replaced in Pittsburgh by Tomas Vokoun from Czechoslovakia.
The move is simply being considered so that Canada can have the strength in young netminders that the United States and European countries have had for years. There’s no promise that banning European netminders in the CHL will improve the problem, but it’s something the league thinks is worth a shot.