I don't believe in the "expansion will dilute the talent pool" argument

[Djp]

The real issue with expansion is that it makes it really hard for your team to win the Cup, and more on the nose, much harder to be in the group of teams that *think* you can win the Cup.

To be the 10th best team in a 21 team league, you're barely above average. To be the 10th best team in a 36 team league, you're in the top 27.7 %. It also makes it harder to be the team that has a serious shot at getting "hot shot new projected first overall pick" to get the fans excited about the future.

The end result is you have a bunch of teams in a big murky middle. You can expand the Playoffs all you want, but just making it to the Conference Semifinals (or the divisional finals or whatever they call it, the last 8) becomes a lot more of a challenge, so you don't feel all that close to thinking your team can win a Cup.

This has a real potential to kill interest because most casual sports aren't going to live and breathe a team that they don't think has a real shot at it.

36 team league...playoffs would be top 24

 

[Coaches Coroner]

I don't think it makes the league worse. It changes the dynamic of team building, in a way that could create less parity.

 

[Kuz]

It also gives some new players the chance to shine who might never have gotten the opportunity somewhere Else.

Karlsson, Marchessault, Haula, Rielly Smith, Tuch, Theodore, Schmidt and Miller all had an excellent season in Vegas first year. Playing way above what people expected.

So you will find 2nd to third line talents being able to play higher up in the lineup

 

[WarriorofTime]

36 team league...playoffs would be top 24

I could see 18 with a Play-In thing similar to the NBA

 

[NVious]

It literally can't do anything but do that.

For all the players that now get an opportunity to succeed that will do that, you'll have 10+ AHL tier players stinking up the joint

 

[Ace]

I wasn’t aware it was an argument to say that adding more players who currently aren’t deemed good enough for the league by 32 teams would dilute the talent pool.

What does the other side of that even sound like? It has to ignore math, facts, common sense…

 

[Golden_Jet]

36 team league...playoffs would be top 24

Worse idea than expansion lol

 

[Djp]

having 36 team would kill any rivalry in the league. I barely remember the last time Habs and Boston played in the playoff. It would also make it harder to win the stanley cup or rebuilding a team longer.

Mo.

In a 36 tram league you have home and home with every team for 70.

Then you have 9 4 team divisions where teams play 4 more times for 12 more games.

The teams could be divided up into riv al pairs tern 2 pairs are in each division. This rotates

Playoffs...9 division winners and the next 15 overall based overall based on 70 games. The 2 games with rival and division fors are designated before season.

Top 4 division winner and next top 4 OS get byes

Others play best of 5. Second round is best of 5. Rest are 7 games

You could instead do 70cgames and then do 4 more H&H with rival and 3 other teams. Some of thesevoccur in erurope.

Then they do an in season 3 on 3 tournament of 6 6 teams in a group of play each other twice with 10 games of 20 min over 3 weekends. Or 9 5 team groups, each other twice over 3 weekends. Top 16 moved onto 4 5m4 team over 2 weekends then winners play at all stat break fri and sun with skills on sat

 

[psycat]

See, I think it will. If you add two teams, you add roughly 40-50 players to the league.

The majority of that, say 35-40, will merely be your higher-end AHL talent that couldn't stick with an NHL roster. And the others will be the over-the-hill vets that no ones wants but will get signed to plug a hole. You might get a few randos from European leagues but I imagine no more or less than usual.

Just a basic normalized distribution tells you that if you increase the population size, you will be diluting of the mean because we are not adding top talent on the other end. If they were there to add, they would already be in the league. Not like there are 20 1Cs over in Europe or the KHL that can't get an NHL deal. Instead, you're adding several AHL/AAAA players. So yeah, overall weaker. I do not agree with your premise.

Suppose it depends on if you believe some 2nd centers etc are infact hidden 1s whom improve with the opportunity and that bottom 3 players could be replaced with top of the AHL/SHL/NLA/KHL etc without much difference once those are distributed to the new teams or not.

 

[WarriorofTime]

It literally can't do anything but do that.

For all the players that now get an opportunity to succeed that will do that, you'll have 10+ AHL tier players stinking up the joint

Hard to quantify such a thing. When the League expanded from 6 to 12, yeah you naturally had the new expansion teams filling their ranks with prime-aged minor leaguers because they didn't have a choice. When you add 2 new teams though, it's going to be a lot more of a mixed bag around the edges, the 1st round prospect that makes a team a year earlier, the old former all star that's able to hang on one year longer, the guy that gets offered just a little bit more more money to not go back to play in his home country in Europe. It's a bit tougher to point out and say "ah, those 10 guys, those are the crappy elevated minor leaguers making the league worse now".

 

[nturn06]

If you add half a cup of water to half a cup of coffee, will you dilute the coffee?

I think that people are arguing that if you add a 1/8 cup of water to a cup of coffee it does not really dilute the coffee.... But the reality is that if you add a 1/8 cup of water to a cup of coffee you get what is called airplane coffee

 

[NVious]

Hard to quantify such a thing. When the League expanded from 6 to 12, yeah you naturally had the new expansion teams filling their ranks with prime-aged minor leaguers because they didn't have a choice. When you add 2 new teams though, it's going to be a lot more of a mixed bag around the edges, the 1st round prospect that makes a team a year earlier, the old former all star that's able to hang on one year longer, the guy that gets offered just a little bit more more money to not go back to play in his home country in Europe. It's a bit tougher to point out and say "ah, those 10 guys, those are the crappy elevated minor leaguers making the league worse now".

Yeah because nobody cares about those guys, sure it's awesome when some 3rd/4th line guy becomes a 1st/2nd line guy or a fringe defenseman makes the jump into the top 4 of an expansion team, but for all those stories there are teams left to fill holes with guys worse than them that will play 10-20-40 games and have awful results, never to be heard from again in the NHL.

The reason most guys aren't top guys or in the NHL isn't due to bad luck or bad placement on a team, they're just not good enough, the more teams you add, the more of those guys you add. Again nobody is gonna make a thread, write a story or create a video about "look at this 13th forward who sucked for the Jackers" or "look at this 9th defenseman who sucked for Ottawa" because it's a non story.

 

[bov]

Agree with OP, it won't worsen the quality of the product even slightly. Crazy that people believe so.

 

[EXTRAS]

If people want the high scoring games to continue you gotta keep adding teams.

 

[LuckyDay]

Expansion has always been very good for hockey
Not just in terms of money for both the league, teams, and the players but in the way the game has been played.
The first expansion in the 20's brought in American teams that were significantly healthier than Canadian teams which couldn't sustain themselves.
In the 1960's expansions extended the careers of players that would normally have been forced out and showed they not only could still play but they were significantly better than the teams that got rid of them thought. It also brought players up from the minors who kept down for political reasons.
It also allowed hockey to compete with other sports including, and especially Basketball.
The draft was implemented. The players union was finally founded.
The WHA showed there was an appetite for even more teams and a league that was run.

With expansion innovation starts to happen and new coaching. The minor league style of goon teams were brought in the Philadelphia wins the cup. Every team must now have enforcers including and especially Boston. We suddenly had Europeans playing in the league. With Europeans comes faster skating and the Cycle.
Coaches and GM's are suddenly not safe in their positions and they can no longer manage their teams for decades.
With the WHA we get the run and gun style and when those teams were brought in they bring that style to the NHL. The Oilers win the cup.
Hockey has become huge at the college level and the number of American players grows exponentially. There's much more of a system of development in place now other than Jr. Players like Austin Matthews wouldn't exist because who's heard of hockey in Arizona? Would countries like Switzerland or Latvia develop hockey programs without expansion?

None of this happens without expansion. We'd have the same ol' style and players with innovations few and far between.

 

[GlitchMarner]

I don't know if it'll dilute the talent pool (a lot of people play ice hockey these days), but it will certainly make it harder for current teams to win the Stanley Cup, and as a fan of a team that hasn't won the Cup in over 55 years, I can't say I like that.

 

[wetcoast]

NHL became international in 1924.

Not in any real sense no it didn't.

Look through the entire 06 period it's basically players from 5 provinces in the NHL, even with expansion the maritimes best players are mainly from this century, al MaCinnis aside.

Same with British columbia developing high end talent through academies after a couple of stars in the 80s and 90s and before that not much really.

The supposed lack of talent is really just that and not real.

The over coaching in todays' game and where the worst NHL players can all sakte and compete much better than the worst NHL players in the past make it a much more narrow gap now.

 

[AvroArrow]

Where are the 50 ish new players coming from ? Is there enough NHL talent in the AHL or KHL ? It will absolutely dilute the talent pool.

 

[Grifter3511]

Maybe back in 1967-1968 when the talent pool had all Canadians.

Back then, you had no Russians, no Swedes, no Finns, and no Americans in the talent pool.

I don't think expansion will dilute the talent pool this time around.

The talent pool is getting deeper. You have more talented Americans dominating the rosters.

You have the European talent base getting stronger. Canadians talent pool is dwindling because lack of interest.

So when the NHL expands in a couple of years, the talent pool, already discussed, will get stronger, not weaker.

If you are arguing that the amount of people playing hockey around the world is rising significantly, then ok.

But all things being equal, it's math and the talent pool would lessen. If there were suddenly 2 more teams, 45 players who are currently in the AHL because they aren't good enough to crack an NHL roster permanently would suddenly be in the league.

 

[Beau Knows]

It obviously will dilute the talent in the NHL, the question is how much.

I think you could make a case that with the rate the game has been growing, particularly in the US, that adding a few teams every 5-10 years shouldn't have all that big of an impact. In theory, there's enough good players out there in other leagues.

 

[Juicy Pop]

It necessarily has to, even if you operate on the assumption that there are 40+ players who are vastly underutilized and underpaid. Those teams are necessarily less talented after moving on from those players.

The real question is whether an expansion does anything to grow interest in the game at a youth level. That's debatable.

 

[qcal1427]

Possible for sure. The one thing it does is gives those 2nd tier good players more ice time. If you cut the number of teams in half, you'd have a guy like Beniers or Hayton or Malkin or Zary in 3rd or 4th line roles. They all need to have 20min/night not 10min. So it does increase the number of minutes of available for good players to strut their stuff just a little more.

I will admit that I didn't quite consider the talent that naturally comes up through the draft but even there is another good example of expansion dilute a draft round. When it was 28 teams, you had 28 first rounders. Now you have 32 meaning 4 guys that were high 2nds are now late firsts. Through 7 rounds, you're adding 14 more players. And you're basically adding them in the 7th round. 14 extra guys that wouldn't have been drafted otherwise.

Yea I mean once again it definitely is diluted -- the main thing is it's adding 6% more of everything to the league which is really not a big number in the grand scheme of things.

Vegas and Seattle had a bigger impact on talent dilution numbers wise, and the league is better than ever since they joined. Not something to be worried about

 

[Master P]

One word shows the dilution of talent........

Goaltending

Have the players go back to using wood sticks and watch as we enter a "golden era" of goaltending.

 

[SmoggyTwinkles]

Maybe back in 1967-1968 when the talent pool had all Canadians.

Back then, you had no Russians, no Swedes, no Finns, and no Americans in the talent pool.

I don't think expansion will dilute the talent pool this time around.

The talent pool is getting deeper. You have more talented Americans dominating the rosters.

You have the European talent base getting stronger. Canadians talent pool is dwindling because lack of interest.

So when the NHL expands in a couple of years, the talent pool, already discussed, will get stronger, not weaker.

Make the league 6 teams again................the talent pool completely changes.

Saying "I don't believe expansion dilutes the talent pool" is an opinion.........which is absolutely wrong.

Think a little deeper about it.

The best atheletes in the world, 6 teams, the best of the best want to play for a team. That's a whole lot of hockey players that can't even get a whiff of chance to play for that team.

 

[The Hockey Tonk Man]

Bruins will have 4 4th lines instead of 3!