Shapiro on the shrinking prospect tournament

The Hockey Writers’ Mark Scheig and EP Rinkside’s Sean Shapiro are reporting that the Red Wings’ 2023 Prospect Tournament may only include 4 teams this fall, down from the 5 which participated last year, and the original design of an 8-team tournament.

This morning, Shapiro discusses this development on his Substack, Shapiro argues that the Red Wings’ prospect tournament was too successful for its own good, and he suggests that it’s not a bad development that the number of teams participating has dropped from 8 to 4:

The Traverse City tournament the Detroit Red Wings hosted used to be the gold standard. It was launched in 1998 with four teams, eventually grew to an eight-team tournament, and has now shrunk back to it’s original size for 2023 with four teams — Detroit, Dallas Stars, Toronto Maple Leafs, and Columbus Blue Jackets, the first game will be Sept. 14.

The Traverse City tournament is a victim of its own success.

Other teams, like the Minnesota Wild and Chicago Blackhawks, saw the Red Wings were able to use it as a marketing event and further reach out to fans outside of metro Detroit. Others focused on the price and geography, Traverse City isn’t easy to get to, and the tournament started to shrink with the help of COVID-related budget assessments — it’s much cheaper, for example, for the Carolina Hurricanes to participate in a prospect tournament closer to home than northern Michigan.

CentreIce arena in Traverse City, with all due respect, also doesn’t offer the modern amenities that the Sabres are able to offer at the Harborcenter, which allowed Buffalo to pull some teams that Detroit would have courted in the past.

While selfishly it was great when the Traverse City tournament was in it’s heyday — you could watch eight prospect pools in a single day! — truthfully it was too much hockey. Each team played four games in five days, both had two back-to-backs and that final game — aside from the championship — was often a nothing-burger of a contest for all involved.

Continued; I don’t know what the future holds for the Red Wings’ prospect tournament.

It may be that the Red Wings have to move it down to Detroit to assure that there are better amenities available to the prospects who participate, or to eliminate some of the travel issues as Traverse City is still “out of the way” despite being an Ann Arbor-sized city with a fine regional airport.

It may be that the Red Wings and Centre ICE Arena have to work on some renovations to the rink to help draw teams in.

And it may be that the tournament simply dissolves, and Detroit ends up taking part in another team’s tournament, because other organizations are utilizing their practice facilities and specially-built downtown rinks to draw competition to their regionally-based tournaments.

For the present moment, the four-team tournament should be exciting, and I’m hoping that the Matthew Wuest Cup is awarded this September.