Tough questions with WHL Commissioner Dan Near

Near believes that they won’t see a mass exit of players to the NCAA and AHL with these rule changes. He said which league a player goes into is going to depend on the path they need to make it to the pro levels, and that the worry about the WHL’s quality of play dropping in the future shows just how much fans care about this league.

“It’s an emotional time, because I think we like what we are, and we’re proud of our heritage of promoting players to the NHL, pro hockey, and historically on to U Sports and into the real world.”

He added that there are still conversations between the NCAA, AHL, the three leagues in the CHL, and even the NHL to make sure that everyone can put their best product on the ice.

“I think there’s a real fine line between ‘digging your heels in and saying everything we do is the best,’ versus ‘being strategic and collaborative and open-minded and listening’.” He added, “We spend a lot of time with the other constituents. It’s not like a Cold War, we work with them and we negotiate, and the NHL does recognize that we’re by far their most important and reliable development pipeline, and they’re concerned about decisions that would hurt that.”

Near also spoke about the shift away from the paid subscription service of WHL Live and the move to the free use of Victory+ for streaming games. While WHL Live helped generate revenue for the league through its paid service, Near said that the shift to a free subscription base has put the best players in the WHL in front of a lot more eyes this year.

“The important thing is our brand and exposure and people knowing our product. You’ve got a player here, Max Heise, drafted to San Jose. Cootes is a Vancouver player. We want people from outside of Prince Albert to follow the Raiders, too. We want fans from around the league to watch games when their team’s not playing. We’re even talking about, we ought to be staggering our start times when we have games in the same night, so you can toggle from game to game.”

He also acknowledged that there are definitely growing pains in the first year of switching to a new streaming service, and the league is listening to feedback from fans on how to improve the product in the future.

“Certainly there’s training our camera operators, having enough cameras, having the best quality streams. As you look around the league, it’s not totally consistent right now. I think our graphics package is pretty good right now, we could be better in replays, we want to work through all those things to make an enhanced fan experience at the end of the day.”

One of the toughest questions Near faced was about comments he made about the Penticton Vees expansion during an episode of ‘The Sheet with Jeff Marek’ podcast. During that interview, he spoke about concerns the league considered with the expansion team.

In the podcast, Near said, “Did we have questions about whether a community of 30 to 40,000ish people could sustain a Western Hockey League team? Sure we did, but then you get there, you see the facility…”

With that answer in mind, Near was asked about what the community-owned teams in smaller Saskatchewan markets (Moose Jaw, Swift Current, and Prince Albert) do differently to keep themselves viable in the current WHL.

“I try not to distinguish too much between who owns them, whether it’s community owned or privately owned in a small center, because I think the challenges are real and they’re the same. You rely on a significant percentage of the population to be interested in the team, and I think that’s one of the things that’s magical about the Western Hockey League, everybody in PA is paying attention to what’s going on at this point in time, and you can’t say that in every center.”

Near added, “Having said that, I think that one of the things that’s happening in this very competitive junior hockey and high-performance hockey environment is the costs are going up to operate… and I think that it’s no secret Prince Albert desperately needs a new facility. There’s no question in my mind you have the fan support and the corporate support to be a long-standing team in this league, but I think that having a capacity constraint… it’s great to be sold out, it’s great to be at 102% capacity every night. We need a facility that we can continue to grow with the rising costs of doing business.”

Finally, Near was asked about the Sportsnet report that said the WHL is going to be extending next season by one whole week, and the rumours going around that the league is going to be reducing the first round of the playoffs to a best-of-five series instead of the traditional best-of-seven that is played now.

Near neither confirmed or denied the reports, but said that any decision that is made still has to be discussed with the other leagues in the CHL, and any kind of announcement regarding changes to next season will not come out until after the Memorial Cup in May.

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nick.nielsen@pattisonmedia.com

by Nick Nielsen

Tough questions with WHL Commissioner Dan Near

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