I very happily pay the $8 a month to subscribe to Sean Shapiro’s Substack as the former Dallas Stars correspondent and EP Rinkside contributor is an excellent writer with a fine hockey mind. As he lives in Detroit, he attended several days of this year’s 2023 Summer Development Camp, and today, Sean offers some thoughts regarding the process and product thereof:
The stuff we see, the on-ice portion, is only the surface level. For some teams it’s completely unnecessary, which is why the Chicago Blackhawks completely ditched any on-ice activities at their development camp.
Development camps are more about the back-end prospect education. Teaching younger players how to eat and cook for themselves, getting some base-level medical scans on some players from Europe while they are in the NHL facility.
The off-ice growth, the Detroit Red Wings took the prospects to play paint ball for example, is hidden within the NHL machine.
Wouldn’t it be more interesting to read about how the paintball game played out that how a 19-year-old worked on his skating edges?
Alas, the Red Wings aren’t inviting me, or any media member, to the paintball game anytime soon. So we’ll have to chat about what we could see with our own eyes.
Continued (subscriber-only)
