“I don’t think anything was written in stone at the time,” Campbell said. “They just want the teams to have more options to do more things with their players, not just junior or NHL. If that player had had a couple of 140-point seasons and it was time for him to move on, they wanted more options, more flexibility.”
Columbus Blue Jackets GM Don Waddell said he doesn’t think the change would lead to a surplus of 19 year olds leaving the CHL for the AHL largely for maturity reasons.
“I looked back at my last 10 years as a GM and I found maybe one guy that I would have brought out,” Waddell said. “So, I don’t think it’s going to be a situation just because the rule changes if it does that there’s going to be a surplus of players coming out. There’s a lot of 18-year-old players turning 19 that are not ready for it.
“The American league is a good league and it’s a heavy league and all that. You’ve got to be careful if you’re putting a young kid in an American league city. Usually if you bring a young kid to your NHL team, you have him with the family of one of the players. The American league is much different because it’s younger guys, but that’s pretty young to put a kid on his own without a lot of direction. You have to make sure the player is physically ready but also maturity too.”
There are exceptions, of course, and Colorado Avalanche GM Chris MacFarland said he thinks they might have placed forward Calum Ritchie into the AHL when he was a 19-year-old instead of him playing his fourth season with Oshawa of the OHL in 2024-25.
Ritchie was traded to the New York Islanders on March 6, 2025. He had 80 points (28 goals, 52 assists) in 50 games for Oshawa in 2023-24, the season after the Avalanche selected him with the No. 27 pick in the 2023 NHL Draft.
“It would have been nice to at least have that as a potential discussion,” MacFarland said. “I get the importance of it for the major junior teams. These are good players for their organizations, but from looking at it as a possible development tool for certain types of players, I think it would be a nice thing to have in the toolbox, whether it’s a player that’s physically ready or he’s a player like a Calum Ritchie, very skilled, just to see what it looks like for his development. You want to do what’s best for the player at every stage when you’ve drafted him and that’s the impetus of the discussion.”
