When you watch a professional sport on TV, it’s very easy to get mad at the players for not doing what you want them to. We’re all guilty of yelling at them or telling them how stupid they are from the comfort of our own couch. But let’s look and see how hard it really is to make it into yet another one of these professional sports leagues: the NHL.
Watching a hockey game, especially an NHL game, can be one of the most stressful sports to watch on TV. From an audience perspective, it seems quite simple to move the puck where you want it to go – especially when the camera angles give us a birds-eye view of the action. But let’s put ourselves in these athletes’ shoes. How do they feel when they let their fans down? Or better yet, when they win a game and know their fans are happy. And how exactly they got to be where they are today? Let’s take a look at the statistics.
Recently, college hockey has been making a bigger impact on the NHL than it ever has before. Numbers are rising when it comes to how many college hockey players are being drafted into the NHL. In 2013-14, 305 former college players were brought to the NHL, making up 31% of the league.
When you look at how things were about 10 years ago, you will notice that one in five NHL players had a college background or degree at all. In the last 7 years, 36% of NHL debuts have been by players that had formerly played in college.
For the last 12 years, NHL drafts have recruited at least 60 current or future college players – and teams in increasingly looking to the NCAA to sign a free agent hockey players.
An athlete that wants to be taken seriously will start their career in high school. According to the NCAA, there are about 35,198 men’s ice hockey athletes in high school. 10,057 of those are seniors and about 3,964 of those seniors become NCAA student athletes. There are approximately 1,133 roster positions available to freshman student-athletes. 881 of the NCAA athletes are seniors that are looking to be drafted to the NHL. But in reality, only 7 of those athletes will be drafted.
Some people say you have better chances of winning the lottery than you have on making it to the NHL. But the odds are in fact increasing by the year. However, let’s not forget there are athletes in Canada as well that want to make it to the NHL.
Cory Conacher’s journey becoming a professional hockey career is an unusual one, but a perfect example as to what is happening in the NHL. Conacher went undrafted out of Canadian Junior A hockey and enrolled at Canisius College in Buffalo to join their NCAA Division I hockey team. Eventually, Conacher became a huge star and was given an AHL contract and is now known as one of the NHL’s top producing rookies to watch.
Conacher is only one of many athletes that were found this way. There are some special hockey players that go undrafted, and many of them are seen today as outstanding players in the NHL. These statistics show that while it is hard to make it to the NHL, the odds are becoming more favorable to undrafted players. In my opinion, hockey is one of the fastest growing professional sports and coaches are looking more and more for young players they can mold into a star and bring home a Stanley Cup Championship. It’s the young rookies that you have to watch out for because you don’t know what to expect from them. And more time than you’d think, it’s nothing but greatness.
*Section Photo credit to TodaysSlaphot.com; Featured Photo (above) credit to TwinCitiesDailyPhoto.com
