Nah, it’s certainly not an inferior league. Performance in the SHL transforms much better to the NHL than the AHL and most AHLers are waaay behind in the SHL.
This will be interpreted wrong, but the hardest part with playing in the AHL is that game is so “crappy”. There are many really good grinders developed in especially the CHLs, the skill goes to the NHL and the top grinders to the AHL. It’s 4th line hockey.
I think that the SHL is much more like the NHL than the AHL. Compare how any top 3 lines in the NHL plays with the AHL game. It’s like night and day.
The AHL is great in that it extreme in the areas most kids needs to grow in to take the step to the NHL. It’s a crash course to get to the NHL for kids and good at it. But if you look longer than a 3 months perspective, I think the AHL really can be questioned.
I don't agree with any of your assessment of the AHL, but that's nothing new.
And honestly, we've seen plenty of mediocre AHL and even ECHL guys go over to the SHL and play really well. Jodie Curran was garbage, an ECHL player, and now he's having his second consecutive awesome season in Sweden scoring almost a point per game (on D) and he's like third in the league. Ryan Lasch was a nobody here, and he's been a star in the SHL for years. Rodin couldn't hang in the AHL and he's killing it back home. There are a dozen or more examples of this each year. Different names, same story. And by the same token, tons of guys come from Sweden or other European countries after having great success and can't adapt, at all.
But then some guys do adapt when coming over, and some North American guys of course fail when heading overseas. But the AHL as some sort of garbage bin league that just develops grinders? It's totally false. The whole narrative is off. In fact, the AHL is
loaded with skill guys who play a skill game, but play it at a speed too slowly to succeed in the NHL. Look at some of the names rumored to move--Bracco, Borgstrom, Vorobeyev, Volkov, Barre-Boulet, for example--those are high-skill players who haven't been able to catch on in the NHL. And there are lots of other young players like them. And there are even MORE veteran skilled players who stick around to make a decent buck but never could make the NHL.
So, there's lots of skill in the AHL. Lots of skilled players. And most teams play some variation of the NHL parent team's system. Sometimes you describe what you see in the AHL and I feel like I'm watching something completely different. I know you've mentioned that the league was viewed this way when you played, and guys you know had negative opinions of the league. Maybe it was true then? I don't see it now. The AHL is certainly not on par with the NHL in terms of skill, but no league is.
I do agree that the SHL most closely mirrors the play style of the NHL
outside of the AHL, which I have said many times. So I partially agree with you on that point.
