What Michkov's benching reminds us about the NHL's development model

In 1979 the NHL added four teams to bring the league’s total to 21, a number it maintained until 1991. That’s when the San Jose Sharks joined the league, followed shortly by the Tampa Bay Lightning and Ottawa Senators.

Since ’91, the league has added a whopping 11 additional teams to bring the total to 32, and that influx of bodies has drastically changed the complexion of the National Hockey League.

With the recent additions of Las Vegas and Seattle I’ve found a vague feeling has taken a more tangible shape: at this point, the NHL is at least partially a development league.

A developmental league for … the rest of the NHL.

The NHL is undeniably the best league in the world, and the overall quality of play is through the roof, but it is no longer the league to which you graduate only when you’re a finished product. The league now simply requires too many bodies to function that way.

The addition of new teams has meant there's a lower floor for who plays in the league, which means some teams carry multiple players who very recently would’ve been deemed “not ready.” In the case of the current, rebuilding San Jose Sharks, several players on a single roster may fall into that category.

The amount of players in the league has always arbitrarily changed with the rising number of teams. It used to be 500 players in the world were NHLers, then 600 and 700. This year there were 707 players on opening day rosters, and by the time the season is played, more than 1,000 players will have taken a few shifts in the NHL.

The case I’m making here isn’t that the product has become less enjoyable, it’s just a different one. In fact, I think you can argue it makes for a more entertaining one. With a lower floor to reach the league, you get more imperfect players who make mistakes, which allows the elite to stand out and capitalize to become stars. And stars are what sell the game, so that’s not such a bad thing. Mistakes also lead to goals (which are up!) and fans seem to like that, too.

I know there will be arguments that there are more players than ever as well, as more leagues and countries develop more capable professional players. But we’ve just added 50 new NHL jobs over the past few seasons, and so it feels like we’ve recently dipped more heavily into the pool of flawed players on the fringes.

It’s why we’ve joked on Real Kyper and Bourne about the need for a "Super League" of sorts, as the NHL itself has grown so vast.

On this note: I wrote earlier in the week about the decline in league-wide save percentage, and one of the reasons I failed to suggest was that teams no longer lean on the world's best starters. They now regularly roll out the best 64, or even the best 96 goalies more evenly. Well over 100 goalies play games in each NHL season now and I wonder if the lower talent floor affects that overall average. (Also: If you can tell the 90^th-best goalie in the world from the 110^th-best, you’ve got some unbelievably valuable scouting skills.)

The point with all this is that where most teams used to say “we need to let this guy develop a bit before we give him a shot,” now they have to teach him on the job.

In a 20-team league, I’m not sure you'd see a team like the Montreal Canadiens doing on-the-job training with so many young defencemen all at once. Some of the lower-end “rebuilding” teams are almost like AHL teams playing up in the NHL -- they have no intention to win and are purely trying to develop their young talent for when it’s time to graduate to the real NHL within the NHL (which I quantify as “teams trying to win the Stanley Cup.” And there's still probably about 21 of those, as there was 30 years ago).

As a recent example of the coaching necessary today, John Tortorella is dealing with the uber-talented Matvei Michkov, a developing superstar who just won the NHL’s rookie-of-the-month, thanks in large part to his power play exploits. And while Michkov may still have cracked the league with fewer teams back in the day, Tortorella’s thoughts on benching him last week speak to a way in which many coaches have to handle their young, “not quite ready” players around the league.

To me, this isn’t about one player, but a new type of player many coaches are talking with.

"He's a 19-year-old kid playing in the best league in the world. I think he's beginning to see what the National Hockey League is, as far as the speed, as far as time and space, all the things that come with it. There are going to be some major struggles within 5-on-5. We expect that.

Where I'm going to have to teach, and in that teaching moment, I'm not going to tell you what it's all about, but if we keep on seeing the same mistake, and it just totally is not concentrating on a certain part of the game... I've been very honest with him about that. He's going to miss some ice. He's gonna watch the game.

It's not me screaming at him. It's telling him this is how it works. And if I think other guys are going and you're struggling in certain situations and it's repetitive, you're gonna have to sit and watch for a little bit.

…That's all that was. He's had some struggles. He doesn't play four games and six nights over there, he doesn't play against competition like he plays here. So there are going to be some major struggles with his 5 on 5 game.

That's the way it's going to be. He may miss games. Who knows? I don't know what's going to happen. But that's part of the development of a 19-year-old kid."

There was a time when certain successful organizations would have NHL-ready players in the minors simply because they didn’t have the space for them. It was rare, but the belief of the Ken Holland/Mike Babcock Detroit Red Wings was that they had certain players they didn’t want to put in until they were “overripe.”

Those days are long gone. Today’s AHL does not have more than a few players who are “overripe.”

With so many NHL teams, and with a flat salary cap for years (meaning everyone is jammed up against the ceiling and looking for discount players), the second someone is capable of handling NHL minutes, they get promoted. I’ve probably undersold the salary cap as a contributing factor here, too. Teams need cheap players, which means they’re more likely to give young kids on entry-level deals a shot.

What might be frustrating for some coaches, is that young players who’ve never run into hardship – which can lead to entitlement and its associated resistance to coaching – continue to be granted opportunities, and believe they deserve more. With more young players you’re inevitably going to have situations where Tortorella sits Michkov, or Lane Hutson is asked to be slightly different than the player who’s never been anything but successful on the way up.

Developing rookies has always been a thing, but the volume of players doing on-the-job on an NHL team (especially non-playoff teams) seems at an all-time high.

What’s most frustrating for fans is having to pay full-boat for season tickets while watching an NHL team that’s operating purely for development purposes. We’re weeks into 2024-25 and at least five teams are already silently flying surrender flags.

It’s just become part of the product we consume. The idea of a player being “NHL ready” no longer means “ready to contribute in the NHL on a winning team.” It means he’s a puzzle piece that fits into both a team’s salary cap and their plans for the future.

There are more players than ever who are “NHL players,” yet just not ready to play on the best teams who expect to be in post-season battles. Making sense of players and doing talent evaluations league-wide gets easier to accept once you see the league within the league.

There’s more development happening once players have “made it” than ever before.