It's hard to believe it's been almost a year since the Centennial Cup national junior A hockey championship was held in Estevan.
The tournament was, by anyone's standards, an incredible success. It was a showcase of our community, its people and the magnificent venue at Affinity Place. The hockey was great. The host committee and the Estevan Bruins did a fantastic job of pulling off the biggest, and arguably best, tournament in the Centennial Cup's 50-year history.
And it was just great to have a tournament like this again after the 2020 and 2021 editions were cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
A lot has certainly changed, though, for the tournament and for Hockey Canada.
It was last year on May 26 – the off day for the tournament, between the end of the round robin and the start of the playoffs – that a story broke about an alleged sexual assault in London, Ont., involving eight players from the Canadian Hockey League, including members of the 2018 World Junior Hockey Championship team that won the gold medal a few months earlier.
The fallout resulted in serious consequences for Hockey Canada. It lost federal funding for nearly a year. The CEO was forced to step down after just a few months on the job. The entire Hockey Canada board stepped down. Corporate sponsors backed out, including Tim Hortons, who sponsored last year's tournament in Estevan.
Hockey Canada has spent the last year trying to emerge from this scandal and all of the associated revelations and consequences.
And now there's uncertainty about how junior A hockey will look in the coming years, after the B.C. Hockey League decided to withdraw from Hockey Canada.
The BCHL decided in 2021 to pull out of the Canadian Junior Hockey League, which is why they didn't have a representative at the Centennial Cup in Estevan last year or Portage la Prairie, Man., this year.
Now the B.C. league has decided to withdraw from Hockey Canada all together. When making the decision, one of the primary and recurring reasons is to be able to have players at the U18 level from outside of the province playing in their league.
You could still see 16- and 17-year-olds playing in B.C., as long as they were residing in that province.
Now, a 16-year-old from Saskatchewan could conceivably play in B.C.
There's also rampant speculation about whether some of the more high-profile teams in Alberta – including the Brooks Bandits, who won last year's tournament in Estevan – would abandon the Alberta league and join this new rebel league.
There are also questions about the eligibility of players who play in the new BCHL. If a 17-year-old player from Saskatchewan were to go play in B.C., only to have it not work out, would that player then be able to play in another Hockey Canada-sanctioned league, whether it be U18 or junior?
The B.C. league also expects to attract talent from the U.S. and even Europe.
There are concerns about how this will impact the calibre of hockey in other provinces. Will there be an enormous out-migration of talent to this new league? Probably not. But even if it's one or two top players per team, that's still going to make a difference in the calibre of play.
If you have fewer talented players here, would that impact the number of scouts coming to watch games in Saskatchewan?
And if B.C. is able to bring in more U18 players, would that impact the calibre of hockey in U18 AAA leagues in Canada?
Lots of questions to be asked. I liked it a lot more last year when the big question was whether anyone would be able to beat Brooks.
Meanwhile, the Centennial Cup is continuing with this uncertainty. The people in Portage la Prairie, Man., are getting treated to some pretty good hockey right now. And they get to enjoy the economic spinoff associated with this tournament.
Hopefully, the players aren't too worried about the direction of junior A hockey in Canada. Instead, their focus can be on the game and the rare opportunity to win a national championship.
But it will be interesting to see what the junior A leagues and the national tournament will look like in a few years.
