OPINION: Players have too much power in modern hockey
Robert Mackay, Calgary Herald

According to the quote from Einstein, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. With the Dragons now hovering around .350 for the past three seasons, you can bet that I was absolutely ready for them to make some changes, try to swing for the fences and pull off some bold plays to halt the slide. I don't agree that the way to do it was necessarily to trade more draft picks but the buzz around the water cooler is that this draft class is shaping up to be among the deepest in a decade, so putting the chips in this year and gambling on next season being weaker is perhaps not the worst decision. Moving back into the first round and giving up a first and a second to the Buffalo Stampede I could live with.

What I really disagree with is how the picks shook out.

Landing the #1 pick is going to be a gigantic boost - that was already going to be the case regardless of which way the Dragons went with the top spot. In a vacuum and looking solely at their skillsets, Frøya Solberg, Céleste Desjardins and Will Tomlander are all completely viable first overall picks; two of them just had the bad luck to all drop at the same time as the third. Let me be clear that when I say what I'm about to say, this is not a reflection on Frøya Solberg as a player: a 30-goal season as a rookie centre is sparkling and soon Calgary can potentially look forward to having the 1C locked down for as long as they can get Solberg signed for.

But we don't play hockey in a vacuum. Tomlander and Desjardins may not have quite as high a ceiling as Frøya does, but they come with the benefit of only costing one pick to acquire; Frøya and Sonja Solberg made it clear to teams that they were a package deal and would not to play without one another meaning that, to keep Frøya happy, Calgary were forced to go all-in and move back into the first round to draft Sonja as well. And in my eyes, this is a potential trend that teams need to stamp out right now, because the Solbergs leveraged Frøya being a world-class talent to force the Dragons to wildly overpay Sonja, a player who tops out at third-line material. If you're content with players being allowed to dictate where they go in the draft, before they've done a single thing in the big leagues, you'll be talking on the other side of your face when its your team being strong-armed into making a bad decision at the behest of an 18-year-old.

You can argue about chemistry and about the natural bond siblings will have from years of being around one another, but where does it end? Five seasons from now, will Frøya start holding out because she's not playing on the same line as her sister? Are teams going to balk at one of them in free agency because they don't want - or can't afford - the other? When one chooses to hang them up, what about the other? No, this needs shutting down now. Players have enough agency - the absolute last thing the league needs is for teenagers to dictate a damn thing about the way franchises run themselves. They need to be concerned with what happens on the ice.

Robert writes for the Calgary Herald on the SHL and SMJHL. All opinions expressed here are his own.


[634 words, 2xDraft]